Most face-to-face events and all online events conducted by the Royal Society of New South Wales are recorded and made available for subsequent viewing on our YouTube channel: youtube.com/royalsocnsw.

The past five weeks have been very active for the Society’s Program Committee, with five events posted to YouTube.

The 30th October 2023 featured a joint UNE SRI and RSNSW presentation on “CleanTech Futures 2023: Electrification and opportunities for community and business” by Professor Renate Egan of UNSW Sydney, which also included a fascinating panel session of energy and local government experts.  This presentation is now available on YouTube.

The annual Royal Society of NSW and Learned Academies Forum was held on 2 November 2023 at Government House Sydney with the theme of “Our 21st Century Brain“.  The preceding link to the event notice provides access to the program and biographies of all presenters.  The series of six session recordings is available from the following YouTube playlist. 

On 8 November 2023, at the 1317th Ordinary General Meeting, Professor Andy Baker FAGU from UNSW Sydney delivered the 2022 Clarke Memorial Lecture on the topic of  “Caves as observatories of groundwater recharge“, the recording of which is available on YouTube.

On 16 November 2023, the Western NSW Branch of the Society, in collaboration with Charles Sturt University, presented a lecture by Professor Lee Baumgartner, Executive Director of the CSU Gulbali Institute for Agriculture, Water, and Environment, titled  “Thirst for power — the rivers of conflict in Southeast Asia“.  The recording of this presentation is now available on YouTube.

The final event for the year was the 1318th Ordinary General Meeting held at the State Library of NSW on Wednesday, 29 November.  On that occasion, Emeritus Professor John Church AO FAA FTSE FAGU of the UNSW Sydney Climate Change Research Centre, an internationally acclaimed expert on sea level rise delivered a lecture titled “What do we really know about 20th- and 21st-century sea-level change?”. Professor Church, the winner of the 2022 RSNSW James Cook Medal, presented persuasive evidence that sea level rise is caused by two main factors: the expansion of the ocean due to heating and the addition of water from the increased melting of glaciers and argued that humankind will have to adapt to that sea-level rise that we can no longer prevent.  The recording of this presentation is now available on our YouTube channel.