Robin Lamboll

Experimental Words, by Experimental Words 10 track album

I do quite a lot of this. It's mostly poetry stuff (in which case I'm usually one of the artists, e.g. experimentalwords.bandcamp.com/album/experi...), but I've also worked with musicians and a modern dancer on some other projects. Hopefully more of it will hit the internet soon!

The lead ballet dancer is also a researcher at Imperial working on plant sciences, and was looking around for related topics after she won the Dance your PhD contest a little while ago!

I'll do a little talk about the science of carbon budgets before a team of dancers lead by Eleonora Moratto and her team of dancers reinterpret science in ballet at this free event:
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/livin...

Performing at the Patras World Poetry Festival this week - quite a lot of it should be livestreamed in case people want to see it abroad! pwpf.gr

Sharing our new paper in #NatureCommunications on solar-based mini-grids interconnecting with national grids can boost reliability, cut costs + emissions, and reduce the risk of asset stranding, co-led by @benwinchester.bsky.social & with @shivmit.bsky.social, + others! @natureportfolio.nature.com

Imperial researchers take leading role in major IPCC climate report | Imperial News | Imperial College London Imperial has more authors contributing to a crucial report on climate change than any other organisation in the world.

🙌Imperial has more authors contributing to a crucial climate report than any other organisation in the world.

Once finished, the IPCC Assessment Report 7 (AR7) report will help shape policies to tackle climate change throughout the 2030s 🧵

📰 ow.ly/BlYz50WIMpk

We actually did, it took ~5 days to finish off leftovers and we froze some.

An investigation into the optimal tiramisu Introduction Tiramisus taste great. But which is the best one? We recently ran an experiment (or, as some might call it, party) to find the best tiramisu. The aims of this experiment were: to estab…

What's the best tiramisu recipe? Can people tell if you make vegan versions? We ran an "experiment" to find out. scienceisshiny.wordpress.com/2025/08/15/a...

A table of IPCC authors for WG1 Chapter 5

Honoured to be selected as a lead author in the upcoming IPCC report chapter on scenarios and projected temperatures (AR7 WG1 Ch5) - looks like we'll have a great team!
For the complete list of authors, see apps.ipcc.ch/report/autho...

Is it time to aim for 1.7°C as the new limit for global warming? With the world on the cusp of passing 1.5°C of warming, scientists are turning their attention to defining a new limit for temperature rises – but not everyone agrees that we should

If 1.5°C warming is the safety line and 2°C the cliff edge, how far into the danger zone can we go?

@joerirogelj.bsky.social and @robinlamboll.bsky.social say we need a clearer, stricter upper limit, around 1.7°C, to guide policy beyond 1.5°C

The question: how close to the edge is too close?

Mele Wedding Customs Intro In 2024 I attended the wedding of my cousin Serah, from the South Pacific nation Vanuatu. Vanuatu has a huge cultural and linguistic diversity, with its 80 islands containing over 130 languag…

Last summer I visited my cousin's wedding in Vanuatu, an intricate and fascinating event which involved a fairly high fraction of all living speakers of the endangered language Mele. I've written a description of events here: scienceisshiny.wordpress.com/2025/07/21/m...

We're within 3 years of reaching a critical climate threshold. Can we reverse course? A report published in June found that the world only has three years before it crosses the 1.5 C climate target. So what should we do now?

Here's a little article on what the very small carbon budget means about 1.5C and what happens after we get there. www.livescience.com/planet-earth...

I'll be at Scenarios Forum in Leeds from tonight - let me know if you want to meet up to discuss things!

More frequent & intense heatwaves are already having a measurable effect on the UK's economy. Workers' health is not sufficiently protected, affecting productivity & putting pressure on health services.
We need adaptation + investment in a low-carbon economy & an equitable transition to net zero.

⚠️Global warming caused by humans is advancing at 0.27°C per decade – the highest rate since records began.

This is one of the indicators updated every year by over 60 international scientists in the annual Indicators of Global Climate Change report – published today. doi.org/10.5194/essd... /1

In case anyone is confused by the different headlines on carbon budgets today, the Guardian's 2 years value is based on a 66% chance, the 3 years comes from a 50% chance.

3. Questions and answers are more useful than lectures, so save extra time for that (you will have to repeat bits of your lecture in the Q+A anyway).

4. Be clear about your own ignorances, particularly regarding local affairs.

1. When in person, assume good faith during any first exchange, but also show your work (put sources, etc.) - don't assume they will assume your good faith.
2. Minimise discussion of models. Climate change is immediately obvious from measurements and people (rightly) distrust models.

Over the weekend I talked to people at Elmbridge's citizen's assembly, giving an introduction to climate change suitable for a general audience which included several climate change skeptics. I thought I'd share some principles I work from when giving these sorts of talks:

🧪 Lead author Hamish Beath explains our paper with a system for evaluating scenarios for climate action in a thread here:

Dr Eleonora Moratto will show us how ballet can be used to tell science stories at the Great Exhibition Road Festival! Featuring nature and climate research by her, @mattcscience.bsky.social, @morenamills.bsky.social and me! www.greatexhibitionroadfestival.co.uk/event/dancin...

I think that's about right. If we reach net zero by 2050, aerosols will be low (unless we emit them on purpose) and it ~doesn't matter when they drop for peak temp. If we keep emitting CO2, aerosol drop matters for temporary temperature.

Depends on the drop, but atmospheric concentrations aren't held fixed, so I don't think it's a useful conversion. But for any conversion to GtCO2, the whole point of a budget is it doesn't matter when you emit the CO2. Almost all paths to net zero feature a drop in aerosols at some point.

I'll be doing poetry with the deeply evocative Fiona Broadhurst at Homebrew Poetry next Wednesday. It will be the last instance of Homebrew for a while, so if you've been meaning to visit now is a good time to go! www.eventbrite.com/e/homebrew-p...

Differences between carbon budget estimates unravelled - Nature Climate Change Estimates of carbon budgets compatible with limiting warming to below specific temperature limits are reviewed, and reasons underlying their differences discussed along with their respective strengths...

If you're going to exceed 2C eventually, dropping aerosols gets the warming sooner, but if you want to avoid 2C it only matters if it happens before or after other things peak.
I will make the moderately strong claim that exceedance budgets have no policy use-cases. www.nature.com/articles/ncl...

I think I see the miscommunication here - you are considering the timing of pathways that will surely exceed 2C and keep going (exceedance budgets), whereas I am considering whether pathways do or don't exceed 2C (avoidance budgets), where the timing of aerosol forcing dropping doesn't matter.

Only if the persistence time overlaps with the time of crossing that boundary (to first order). For 2C and aerosols that's clearly not true, aerosols persist for ~weeks and we're not crossing 2C in weeks with or without them, so you can essentially ignore current emissions. Methane is more complex!

Pretty much, yes. As the time-dependence of CH4/aerosol impact is shorter, it is less problematic to use this than it would be for CO2, though clearly not optimal.

But the calculations are all based on the old database, and don't substantially update until there's a new one. We could harmonise db before calcing results, but since this isn't really what the models indicated, it would mostly be an investigation into the vagaries of the impacts of harmonisation.

Substantial reductions in non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions reductions implied by IPCC estimates of the remaining carbon budget - Communications Earth & Environment Current best estimates of the remaining carbon budgets to meet the Paris Agreements goals assume substantial reductions in methane and other non-CO2 greenhouse gases, and failure to achieve these redu...

There is no non-CO2 budget; our other paper has approximate emissions reductions in non-CO2 gases implied by CO2 budget (www.nature.com/articles/s43...), but emissions time for these isn't approximately irrelevant in the same way, so "budget" metaphor doesn't apply. The calculation doesn't use ECS.