Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I, too, welcome Professor Stott to the committee. This has been a useful tutorial for us in an academic sense and a fruitful exercise. One of the professor's slides mentions the global average surface temperature change from 1850 to 2000. Are we talking about an increase in temperature of up to 5° Celsius?

What will be the permutations for life of the planet if the average temperature increases by that amount by 2100? Will we be in an existential crisis at that stage if we keep going the way we are going?

What kind of radical measures do governments need to take now in respect of policies that will halt the effects of human-induced climate change? The key message that I have taken from Professor Stott's intervention is that human-induced climate change is a major contributory factor to the increases in temperature. If I understand the professor correctly, he is stating that if we continue to go in the way we are going in terms of the production of carbon, we will overshoot what is envisaged in the Paris Agreement as a result of human-induced climate change and that the lack of policy interventions by governments across the globe means that the change being implemented is not radical enough to halt the effects of temperature increases as measured on the Celsius scale. Will the professor expand on that a little?