KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Our understanding of climate change and its impact on our future energy choices

Prof. Phillip Lloyd
CPTU, South Africa

Abstract

In November 2015, the nations of the world gathered in Paris for the 21st Conference of Parties in terms of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The outcome of the Conference was an Agreement. Any rational reading of this document suggests that it is a work of fiction rather a serious attempt to address the problems of the developing world. What is one to do about an ambition such as:
“Emphasizing with serious concern the urgent need to address the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels”?
Can anyone define what the pre-industrial temperature levels were? Were there accurate thermometers available in pre-industrial times? Were those accurate thermometers set up in special shelters well clear of any development and shielded from the radiant heat of the sun? Of course there weren’t. So how can anyone in the world hope to control the temperature 2oC above an unknown temperature? Truly, the climate emperor lacks clothes!
In this lecture I aim to address the neo-colonial aspects of the climate change fictions and their serious implications for the way in which Africa chooses to develop the energy systems it so urgently needs.

Biography of the Keynote Speaker

Philip Lloyd was educated in Chemical Engineering at University of Cape Town and Nuclear Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For 15 years he worked for the Chamber of Mines Research Organization in Johannesburg, becoming Director in due course. He then spent 15 years in the international construction industry, before returning to academic life, first at Wits, then at UCT’s Energy Research Centre, and since 2009 at CPUT’s Energy Institute, based at the SA Renewable Energy Technology Centre. When not being an academic, he runs a small consultancy, Industrial & Petrochemical Consultants, serving the process industries in their widest sense. He has won numerous awards, including the SA National Energy Association’s Award in 2010, the Conrad Gerber African Intellectual of 2012 and nomination as part of the IPCC’s team that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He has over 200 publications to his name.