cc: shepherd_John,h.j.schellnhuber@uea.ac.uk date: Mon Jun 2 15:26:40 2003 from: Mike Hulme subject: Re: idea for Royal Society meeting to: F.Berkhout@sussex.ac.uk (Frans Berkhout) Dear Frans, Thanks for alerting me to this. I will bring this to the attention of John Schellnhuber who will also have some views. "Climate stabilisation" is certainly central to David Warrilow's interests, and has a policy driver rather than a scientific one, but it can mean different things to different people. To do justice to it also requires a widely inter-disciplinary thrust, including economics and technology. A variant on this theme might be to focus on critical thresholds for adaptation to climate change in both human and natural systems - this could bring in some interesting non-standard scientific perspectives from anthropology and biological science, anything to get away from a repeat of the same old IPCC crowd (RS did a meeting on IPCC last December anyway) and thus allowed to be a bit more creative. Mike At 18:06 23/05/2003 +0100, you wrote: Mike I will comment on this next week. On another issue: I am on Brian Hoskyn's Royal Society Global Environmental Research Committee whihc includes bods from various international programmes sponsored mainly by NERC. They are casting around for themes for a possible meeting at the Royal Society (international, high profile, bringing senior and junior researchers together), and something on climate stabilisation was mentioned - partly at the instigation of David Warrilow. Do you think this is sensible? Should there be a Tyndall presence? I agreed with John Shepherd (also at the meeting) that I'd raise this with you. All the best Frans