To London yesterday, to the LSE, to hear Professor Scott Barrett, Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural Resource Economics at Columbia University. Barrett is a leading scholar on transnational and global challenges, ranging from climate change to disease eradication, and he talked about the likelihood of the Paris Climate Summit in December having much effect. The title of the talk was: Midnight in Paris: will COP 21 make a difference?
Here are the details of the lecture which was co-organised by the Grantham Research Institute, and the LSE's department of Geography and Environment. Going to listen to this sounded better than attending the mad scrum that the Paris event will no doubt prove to be. I'll comment on it next week, but before I do, let me say how it started.
The Chair (who never said who he was) introduced Barrett and then told us to keep our mobile phones on so we could tweet about the lecture; he gave us the hashtag. So far, so normal, these days. It was what happened next that was odd. Barrett got up and the first thing he said was to admit to being apprehensive as he didn't know what a tweet was, even though the Earth Institute [ @earthinstitute ] has some 76,000 followers. Barrett said later that, as a theoretician, he didn't get out much. Part of me rather envied him.
Respond