Outline of the talk
The world is heating rapidly. The problem is our collective greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. There is nearly universal consensus that we need immediate and wide-ranging action on climate change. The XR and Fridays for Future movements sweeping the world have helped greatly in bringing this urgency to mainstream consciousness. Yet, when it comes down to international negotiations - indeed even the moral case for climate action - a major point of contention is: who will pay, and how much? That, in turn, raises the question: who is most responsible for it? Is it the countries emitting the most today? Is it the ones that have emitted the most in the past? Do these questions make sense in an increasingly globalised world? Polluter pays” is a well-accepted principle, implying that we need only determine each country’s GHG pollution to find answers to the questions posed above. Easy as this may seem to measure and quantify, it involves a range of nuances including scientific issues of how long GHGs remain in the atmosphere, sociological issues of run-away personal consumption and over-population, and issues of globalisation such as the role of international trade. In this talk, we will analyze GHG emissions in different ways and attempt a piece together what it means for responsibility for climate change, and how countries choose arguments that may appear to be most favorable to making their case.

Profile of the speaker
Chirag Dhara is currently a researcher at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. His current research focuses on atmospheric radiation modeling, and developing climate change projections. He obtained a PhD in The Earth Sciences working at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany. He holds a second PhD having earlier working in theoretical quantum mechanics at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain. His larger interests lie in the impacts of climate change. Chirag is also currently involved in a major national assessment of climate change in India, and with a program in IISER Pune seeking to develop lesson plans on climate change for undergraduate syllabi.