URSI seminar: How we can restore a safe climate – Really.|by Herb Simmons & Ina Horlings

Join us for an engaging online seminar where staff, PhDs, and students are invited to explore Herb Simmons' new book, "A Climate Vocabulary of the Future," and delve into his advocacy for climate restoration. Guided by Ina Horlings, discover innovative strategies reshaping our approach to climate restoration. Following the presentation, there will be ample opportunity for questions and discussion.

About the seminar

The climate crisis has accelerated beyond the projections and expectations of climate scientists in 2023 as temperatures on average reached the 1.5° C level years before expected while Antarctic Sea ice plummeted. The response of the Climate Commissariat was little more than yet another exhortation to decarbonize faster even after 30 years of failure and even as decarbonization no matter how quickly it occurs cannot reduce sharply elevated temperatures. 

Yet - before you despair- there is one approach that has a high likelihood of reducing global temperatures, restoring a safe climate and reducing the risk of suffering, death and Ecosystem collapse.  And that is the equitable and urgent deployment of the Climate Triad   - Accelerated reductions, large scale atmospheric removal of carbon and most importantly and controversially the direct cooling of the climate through sunshine reflection, ecosystem restoration and other means. 

Herb Simmons will describe the dead-end current climate policy is leading us to, the need for a climate triad, how it might happen and how we can restore a safe climate like we experienced in the mid 20th century.  His talk will incorporate many of the words and phrases he created in his recent book A Climate Vocabulary of the Future. Herb’s book has been called a science poem and an inspiration by Kim Stanley Robinson and a masterpiece of Climate education by Edward Saltzberg, the Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum. 

About Herb Simmens

He has been a pathbreaker much of his life. He was the award winning creator of New Jersey’s long range smart growth master plan in 2000 as Executive Director of the New Jersey’s State Planning Commission, and the leader of one of the first consortiums of higher education institutions to fight climate change in the early 2000’s. 

He helped lead the fight in 2017 to have his home community Montgomery County, Maryland declare the first climate emergency in the United States and set the toughest greenhouse gas reduction standards anywhere. 

He’s also been a city manager, taught politics and urban planning at Stockton University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, both in New Jersey, and owned and operated a wellness center in Washington, DC. 

Herb has degrees from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and international Affairs from Princeton He’s also studied at the London School of Economics.

Herb Simmons has also been active in the deep adaptation network and movement, a global community of people who understand and prepare for societal breakdown from climate, economic and environmental crises. See https://www.deepadaptation.info/about/

He lives in Silver Spring, Md and is active in local civic life.  See for more information: Herb Simmens | Author and Planetarian