Feasta, in association with the Trinity Greens presents the Will Howard Memorial Lecture:

Climate Change: first, the bad news, then the good.

7.30pm, April 18th, 2008

Emmet Lecture Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin.
Admission free but donations requested.

This event has been arranged at short notice to commemorate Dr. Will Howard who ran the Cap and Share campaign in Britain and died a month ago. Will’s doctorate was in soil science and so it is particularly appropriate that the two lecturers will link a solution to the climate crisis with an increase in the carbon content of the world’s soils.

The topic is vitally important because any global climate treaty which encouraged a massive switch to biofuels would prove disastrous unless a system was introduced simultaneously which rewarded people for holding carbon in their soils and in the semi-permanent plants growing on them. Otherwise, the world’s forests would be decimated as has already happened in Indonesia as a result of the demand for palm oil as a vehicle fuel. In other countries, land would be switched out of pasture into arable and some of the carbon content of the soil would migrate into the atmosphere.

So, quite apart from the urgent need to turn the world’s soil and the plants growing on them into an emissions sink rather than the source of, perhaps, 25% of the world’s greenhouse emissions, there has to be some means of rewarding the holding of land-based carbon stocks if a climate treaty is not to do more harm than good.

We have also arranged a small-group discussion on Thursday and Friday on the technical problems of measuring soil carbon. If you would like to take part in those, please email- richard[at]douthwaite.net for details.

Speakers:

David Wasdell, Director of the Meridian Programme, a world-renowned expert in the dynamics of climate change, will deliver the bad news. He will argue that because many feedback mechanisms have been ignored, the pace at which climate change is now happening has taken politicians, policymakers and even the UN by surprise. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have already exceeded a safe limit. Consequently not only will every tonne of CO2 emitted from now on have to be recovered and sequestered before its full heating effect has developed but some past emissions will have to be recovered too.

Peter Read, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Applied and International Economics at Massey University in New Zealand, will deliver the good news. Plants and soil lock up huge amounts of carbon. Read contends that it would take only a relatively small increase in the levels of that stored carbon to return atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to safe limits. This would also improve soil fertility and raise incomes for millions of farmers.

Will Howard was Co-ordinator of Cap and Share in Britain (see www.capandshare.org). He worked in the 1980s for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, then as National Coordinator of the broad-based UK organisation Nuclear FREEZE. His new-media company produced The Carbon Gym for the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales. Feasta wishes to join with his wife Lyn and his sons in honouring his work and celebrating his life by dedicating these lectures to him.

Will Howard obituary
Will Howard: a Tribute