Professor Bill McGuire - The Fate of the World: What Earths Past Tells Us About Our Future

About

In this compelling and urgent talk, Professor Bill McGuire takes audiences on a journey through the Earths 4.6-billion-year history to show what our planets past can reveal about our future. Drawing on deep time, he explains how todays rapid global heating is pushing us into climates unseen for millions of years, and why our current conditions already resemble the Eemian interglacialan era when sea levels were 6 to 9 metres higher than they are today.

McGuire will outline how, by the 2030s, we are on course to recreate the Pliocene, a world of transformed coastlines and extreme weather patterns, and whywithout dramatic actionlater this century could even see a shift toward the early Eocene hothouse, a climate last experienced 50 million years ago. It is a trajectory that exposes just how swiftly we are rewinding the planets climate clock.

But while McGuire does not shy away from the severity of what lies ahead, his message is not one of despair. Instead, he offers a clear-eyed form of hope: the kind rooted in choice and action. The geological record shows that every tonne of carbon avoided and every fraction of a degree prevented will meaningfully shape the world future generations inherit. Catastrophe is not predetermined - we still have agency.

McGuire brings scientific authority and moral urgency to one of the defining conversations of our time.In this gripping session, he will explain how we arrived at this moment, what Earths ancient history tells us about the coming centuries, and why the decisions we make now matter more than at any point in human history.

Professor Bill McGuire is one of the UKs leading volcanologists and climate scientists. He is Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL and a world-recognised authority on the links between geological processes and climate change. A former member of the UK Governments Natural Hazard Working Group and contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he has advised governments and international organisations on environmental risk for over three decades. McGuire is also a bestselling author, known for Waking the Giant, Hothouse Earth, Global Catastrophes, and now The Fate of the World, widely regarded as his most urgent and important book to date. His writing has been praised for combining scientific rigour with clarity, immediacy and moral force.

A Q&A Session will follow.