Abstract: The conventional narrative on climate change is that human burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas has been the main driver of climate change. In this talk, we will show that this narrative is upended when we use consistent accounting of CO2 emissions and include the Effective Radiative Forcing (ERF) of all eleven heating and cooling emission species as detailed in the UN IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) instead of just four - CO2, CH4, N2O and Halocarbons. Furthermore, when we take into account the updated Charney sensitivity of 4.5ºC for atmospheric CO2 doubling from Hansen et al (2025), we show the remarkable near cancellation of heating and cooling effects from fossil fuel sources, which makes it clear that stopping fossil fuel use now is suicidal, while reducing meat and dairy consumption is uniformly life-affirming.
About the speaker: Dr. Sailesh Rao, a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras, received his Ph. D. from the Information Systems Laboratory of Stanford University, CA, USA, in 1986. He spent the next two decades primarily developing the high speed communications infrastructure for the fledgling internet. He invented the digital signal processing protocol for the Gigabit Ethernet on copper standard, 1000BASE-T, which is ubiquitous in the internet backbone until today. In 2006, he switched careers and began working full-time on the systems transformations needed to address the environmental problems facing humanity. He is currently Founder and Executive Director of Climate Healers, a non-profit organization dedicated towards healing the earth's climate. In 2023, he was designated a Climate Hero by the Guardian Newspaper, which cited him as "a foremost voice on green transition and the true scale of societal change needed to save the planet."