The past year, 2016, was the warmest globally in records stretching back to 1850. The second warmest year was 2015 and the third warmest 2014. In recent years we have seen weather records being broken more and more often with severe heatwaves, floods and other extreme weather around the world. The risk of some of these extreme weather events has been shown to have increased as a consequence of climate change linked to human activities. In this talk I will discuss the scientific evidence surrounding the causes and consequences of climate change and the prospects for the future. Dr Shuckburgh is co-author of a new Ladybird book on Climate Change which will be published in January 2017. The book has been written with co-authors HRH The Prince of Wales and Tony Juniper, former Executive Director of Friends of the Earth. Biography Dr Emily Shuckburgh is a climate scientist and is deputy head of the Polar Oceans Team at the British Antarctic Survey, which is focused on understanding the role of the polar oceans in the global climate system. She holds a number of positions at the University of Cambridge (fellow of Darwin College, member of the Faculty of Mathematics, associate of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research, associate fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy, member of the Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment and fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership). In the past she has worked at Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris and at MIT . She is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and co-chair of their Climate Science Communications Group, a trustee of the Campaign for Science and Engineering and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. She has also acted as an advisor to the UK Government on behalf of the Natural Envrionment Research Council.

Lyse Doucet is the BBC ’s award winning Chief International Correspondent who spends much of her time covering stories in our news headlines including devastating wars in Syria and Iraq as well as Afghanistan. She often focuses on the human costs of conflict. Her work also involves asking questions of world leaders. Her BBC journalism began with postings in Abidjan, Kabul, Islamabad, Tehran, Amman and Jerusalem. She was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Honours list in 2014 for her services to broadcasting and the Columbia Journalism Award for lifetime achievement in 2016.

There was a general belief that while death rates for children and young adults would fall as we learnt to conquer infectious diseases, death rates for the over 65s would never slow. Yet by the end of the 20th Century, the decline in human mortality rates was fastest for those in old age. It was argued that life expectancy would never reach beyond 90 years. Latest figures suggest that this will be breached with 20 years, and that half of those born today in Europe will reach over 100. At what year will a human live longer than Jeanne Louise Calment – who died at 122 years old in 1997? Or will this be the maximum life span of any human being? With life expectancy gains reaching over 2 years with every decade this lecture will focus on how long human can expect to survive, and ask the question why is there a search for extreme longevity and what will be the societal consequences? Biography Sarah is Professor of Gerontology at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing which she founded in 1997 with funding from the NIA . Sarah currently serves on the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, which advises the Prime Minister on the scientific evidence for strategic policies and frameworks. She chairs the UK government Foresight Review on Ageing Societies, and the European Ageing Index Panel for the UNECE Population Unit. She is a Governor of the Pensions Policy Institute. Sarah was the first holder of the International Chair in Old Age Financial Security, at the University of Malaya (2009/10) and her research was recognized by the 2011 Royal Society for Public Health: Arts and Health Research Award. Sarah has a background in anthropology and population studies and her early research focused on migration and the social implications of demographic change. Her current research on demographic change addresses the global and regional impact of falling fertility and increasing longevity, with a particular interest in Asia and Africa. Sarah has just completed a monograph on Population Challenges for Oxford University Press (2015), and is working her next book for Cambridge University Press Population and Environmental Change. Throughout her academic career, Sarah has combined academic research with external professional commitments. Internationally, Sarah represents the UK on the European Science Academies’ Demographic Change in Europe Panel, serves on the Council of Advisors of Population Europe and on the Advisory Board of the World Demographic Association. She serves on the Advisory Board, English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). Sarah served as Advisor to the Malaysian Government, Advisor to the Singapore Government’s Third Age Council and as a Specialist Advisor for the European Commission Demographic Change Programme.

Political extremism appears to be all around us. Populists, xenophobes and, some might argue, fascists seem to be on the rise. Many trace the current challenge to liberal representative democracy to the legacy of the post-2008 financial crisis and economic scarcity, recycling earlier interpretations of the rise of historic fascism. But what is really driving support for political extremism in the West today? What do we really know about those who vote for these parties, including their backgrounds and concerns? This lecture will examine the drivers of support for contemporary forms of political radicalism and extremism, from the election of Donald Trump to the vote for Brexit in the United Kingdom and to forthcoming elections in France, the Netherlands and Germany. Biography Matthew J. Goodwin is Professor of Politics at Rutherford College, University of Kent, and Senior Visiting Fellow at Chatham House. His books include Revolt on the Right: Explaining Public Support for the Radical Right in Britain (published by Routledge) and a forthcoming study of the Brexit vote with Cambridge University Press. He shares much of his research and thoughts on Twitter (@GoodwinMJ) and his website matthewjgoodwin.org

Extremes of the Universe Andy Fabian, University of Cambridge Darwin College Lecture Series 2017 – Extremes

Distributions that are dominated by extremes and tail events require a completely different way of thinking. We provide a classification and show where conventional statistical tools fail, such as the conventional law of large numbers. We show how robust statistics is not robust at all; how frequency-based forecasting fails and how past averages misrepresent future ones. We show implications for decision-making in the real world and what modifications are required. Ironically they are often easier to work with. See http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html for more details and papers. Biography Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability. 
 Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and Antifragile) covering broad facets of uncertainty. It has been translated into 36 languages. In addition to his trader life, Taleb has also published, as a backup of the Incerto, more than 45 scholarly papers in statistical physics, statistics, philosophy, ethics, economics, international affairs, and quantitative finance, all around the notion of risk and probability. He spent time as a professional researcher (Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU ’s School of Engineering and Dean’s Professor at U. Mass Amherst). His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle disorder (“antifragile”). Taleb refuses all honors and anything that “turns knowledge into a spectator sport”.

Spending up to five months alone at sea, rowing for twelve hours a day, may appear extreme, but Roz Savage will suggest that, like many major achievements, an epic ocean voyage is simply the accumulation of a very large number of tiny actions applied consistently over time. This power of accumulation also applies to phenomena as diverse as environmental degradation (or restoration), living a life of meaning and purpose, or creating the collective future that serves the needs of people and planet. In this very personal lecture, she uses her ocean rowing adventures as the underlying narrative for musings on solitude, psychology, sustainability, systems thinking, the hero’s journey, truth, identity, and free will. Biography Roz Savage MBE spent the first 11 years of her career working as a management consultant, before an environmental epiphany led to her transformation into a world-class adventurer. Since 2005 Roz has rowed, solo, across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans making her the world’s foremost female ocean rower. On the ocean Roz had to redefine her comfort zone on a daily basis, and reach deep into her inner sources of strength, self-discipline, and commitment to her goal, as she spent up to five months alone at sea on a 23-foot rowboat, thousands of miles from land and humanity, at the mercy of winds, waves and currents. Roz now speaks to organisations all over the world that are keen to find new ways to inspire and motivate more engaged, happy and purpose-driven individuals. She shares stories from the epic adventures she has experienced and the lessons she has learned. Her speeches help audiences to take more personal responsibility for their individual and collective success, find higher levels of resilience and courage, more effectively navigate the uncharted waters of change and invest more of themselves into every challenge they undertake.

Many extremist ideologies rely heavily on conspiracy theories to explain how the world works and where power lies. This lecture explores what our understanding of conspiracy theories – where they come from, how they work, who believes in them – can tell us about dealing with extremism. The US presidential election campaign showed that conspiracy theories are increasingly becoming part of the currency of democratic politics. Is democracy itself becoming more extremist? Where do the boundaries lie between the contestation of democratic values and the repudiation of them? This lecture will examine the relationship between harmless conspiracy theories, dangerous extremism and the rise of ‘post-truth’ politics and it will ask how we can still draw the line between them. Biography David Runciman is Professor of Politics and Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at Cambridge University. His books include Political Hypocrisy and The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis and he writes regularly about politics for the London Review of Books. He is one of the directors of a major Leverhulme-funded research project based in Cambridge on Conspiracy and Democracy, which explores the history and impact of conspiracy theories on democratic politics. (More details of the project can be found here: http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/) He is the host of the popular weekly podcast Talking Politics.