Before net zero, climate policy consisted solely of reducing and converging emissions between rich and poor to achieve, in the terms of the Rio Convention, “the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere” at a safe level. But scientists have struggled to establish what that “safe” level is, making little progress in more than a quarter of a century. And it's not because we were incompetent: for fundamental reasons of physics and probability theory, we were asking the wrong question.

A lecture by Myles Allen

Transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available on the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/atmospheric-zero

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