Extreme floods, droughts and heatwaves, and how scientists are battling to deal with the effects of our rapidly warming planet, will be the subject of the first annual Grantham Lecture at Imperial College London on Thursday 22 May 2008.
Journalists are invited to the lecture, which will be given by Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, world-leading meteorologist and Director of Imperial's Grantham Institute for Climate Change.
Speaking at Imperial's South Kensington campus, Sir Brian will describe how global warming is affecting weather patterns, and how it could lead to extreme weather events such as scorching hot summers in Europe, and super-powered storms like Hurricane Katrina becoming more and more frequent.
During the lecture Sir Brian will outline the dramatic effects that climate change and extreme weather could have on the planet including: how rising temperatures are threatening to reduce biodiversity and damage important agricultural land; how rising sea levels could threaten the supply of fresh drinking water in some developing countries; and how changing temperatures could mean tropical diseases like malaria take hold in previously unaffected countries.
He will illustrate how researchers at Imperial College hope to tackle these problems, and how they are also working on alternative fuels and carbon capture technologies to reduce the levels of warming greenhouse gasses currently emitted into the atmosphere.