MCFly wasn’t there at the Levenshulme Festival for this one, so is relying on the jottings of a couple of folks who were. Thanks to them!

As part of the Levenshulme Festival Professor Terry Callaghan of Sheffield University spoke on the theme ‘The Rapidly Changing Arctic Climate: what does it mean for you?’. Terry – who was brought up in Levenshulme – is a research scientist who shared the 2007 Nobel Prize as a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

• Full room with seating on the diagonal to view a screen in one corner.  Little professor buzzing from one angle to another with lively commentary on successive diagrams, graphs and photos.
• Ice mountains slipping tipping rotating and crashing into the sea.
• Population graphs rocketing to vertical.
• Heat out there quite separate from heat down here.
• Oceans different from one another (now how mad is that when they are all joined up)
• Huge new waterways across the Arctic where in my lifetime it was all solid ice.  Quick route to Japan.
• Parts of Scotland still rising from the sea, while land elsewhere is flooding.
• Bangladesh, Holland, Sweden for example could disappear under water in no time.
• Millions displaced.
• The wicked grip of multinational oil companies across the arctic and the world.
• This was a vivid, informative display……..  while Rome burns.
• Many certainties and loads of unknowns.

A young woman asked what she could do and the final shot from Terry Callaghan was to say that she could establish email contact with children in the Arctic to get involved in conversation with them, and he gave her some contacts. Otherwise he was unremittingly gloomy (!) – but then he is a scientist and in the nature of the meeting the politics & morality of response to climate change did not really get a voice.