Date: 10th July 2026, Friday (3:00pm – 4:00pm)
Presenter: Peter Cox (University of Exeter)
Topic: Carbon Cycle Feedbacks and the development of Earth Systems Models

Abstract:
Until the late 1990s, climate models dealt almost exclusively with the physical aspects of the climate. Changes in atmospheric composition, such as the concentrations of the greenhouse methane and carbon dioxide, were prescribed, and the distribution of vegetation types across the globe was fixed. By the early 2000s some climate modelling groups had begun to include an interactive carbon cycle, and even dynamic global vegetation, to form first generation Earth System Models (ESMs). The additional carbon cycle and vegetation feedback processes that they represented had a significant impact on the model projections, accelerating climate changing through amplifying land carbon-climate feedbacks. ESMs have moved on significantly since this time, now including much more complex representations of land and ocean ecosystems, and the nutrient cycles that they rely upon, and in some cases, interactive chemistry. This talk will summarise the evolution of ESMs up to the current day, and discuss remaining uncertainties, emergent simplicities, and priorities for future model development.

Speaker Profile:
Professor Peter Cox is an international leader in the understanding of interactions between the land biosphere and climate change, pioneering the inclusion of the carbon cycle and vegetation as interactive elements within climate models, and alerting the world to the possibility of climate change-driven Amazon forest dieback. He was a lead author on the 4th, 5th and 6th Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is currently Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, having previously worked at the Met Office-Hadley Centre (1990-2004), and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hyrology (2004-2006). Peter Cox has been named as a highly-cited author by Thomson-Reuters for every year from 2014 onwards. He was a co-author of the influential 2009 Royal Society Report on Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty, and his research group have since studied the impact of SRM geoengineering on both coral reefs (Kwiatkowski et al., 2015), and the Amazon rainforest (Parry et al., 2026). In 2025, Prof Cox was an awarded a CBE in the King’s Birthday honours list “for services to Science and Climate Modelling”.

Date: 28th July 2026, Tuesday (11:00am – 12:00pm)
Presenter: Mukesh Kumar Gupta
Topic: Heat Stress Adaptation in Informal Settlements: Evidence, Gaps and the Road Ahead

Abstract:
Rising temperatures and rapid urbanisation are converging most sharply in informal settlements across Asia and Africa, where dense housing, heat-retaining materials and limited infrastructure combine to create acute and unequal heat exposure. This talk presents the current landscape of heat stress adaptation strategies and examines what the evidence shows about their effectiveness in improving thermal comfort and reducing health risks. The talk also situates this evidence within wider debates on climate adaptation finance, the global “cooling gap,” and informal settlement governance to community-led resilience.

Speaker Profile:
Dr Mukesh Kumar Gupta is a Science Officer with the IPCC Working Group II Technical Support Unit, supporting the IPCC WGII – Assessment Report 7 including Special Report on Cities and Climate Change. He brings a multidisciplinary background spanning academia, NGOs and the corporate sector, previously serving as Environmental Sciences Program Director and Assistant Professor at the Asian University for Women, Bangladesh. His research centres on energy and natural resource policy, climate change and energy for development, and the multiple impacts of climate action. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences and Policy from Central European University.

Date: 11th August 2026, Tuesday (11:00am – 12:00pm)
Presenter: Pu Lin (Boston College)
Topic: Kilometer-scale Global Atmosphere Modeling: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract:
It has recently become feasible to perform simulations of global atmospheric models at the O(km) horizontal resolution, approaching the resolution to explicitly resolve convection. This new generation of simulations provides unique tools to probe the complex, cross-scale coupling of the climate system, while bearing its own limitations and impediments. In this talk, I will give an incomplete review of the recent developments of the global km-scale modeling. I will also present a set of global aquaplanet simulations based on the GFDL AM4 model with the horizontal resolution progressively increasing from 100km to 6km. Interesting (and perhaps counterintuitive) resolution dependence is found in these simulations in terms of tropical circulation and convection organization, urging a better understanding of the physical processes governing the tropical convections.

Speaker Profile:
Dr. Pu Lin is a senior research scientist at the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, Boston College. Before joining Boston College, she had worked at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) for more than 10 years. She is a member of the core development team of GFDL’s next-generation atmospheric model AM5.