June 21, 2024
Colloquium Topic: Predicting Our Climate Future: what we know, what we don’t know, and what we can’t know
Human-induced climate change raises new, foundational issues in science. It requires us to question what we know and how we know it. The subject is important for society but much of the science is young and history tells us that scientists can get things wrong before they get them right. So how can we judge what information is reliable and what is open to question?
Of course, the existence and the scale of the threat from climate change has robust foundations but understanding the details of that threat raises fundamental challenges; challenges that are as deep and as fascinating as any in the realm of scientific enquiry.
In this colloquium, I will discuss my new book – Predicting Our Climate Future: what we know, what we don’t know, and what we can’t know. I will describe the essential characteristics of human-induced climate change that make it such a difficult and novel issue to study, before addressing some of the key challenges researchers across multiple disciplines must address. My talk will touch on the maths of complexity, the physics of climate, philosophical questions regarding the origins and robustness of knowledge, and the use of natural science in the economics and policy of climate change. I will argue that to support society in building a future that is better than it would otherwise be, there is an urgent need to rethink how we approach the science – and the social science – of climate change.
Colloquium Speaker: David A. Stainforth
David Stainforth is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, and an Honorary Professor in the Physics Department at the University of Warwick. He carries out research on climate science and its relationship with climate economics and policy. He focuses particularly on uncertainty analysis and on how academic assessments can better support decision-making in the context of climate change.
David has a BA in Physics from Oxford University, an MSc in “Energy Systems and Environmental Management” from Glasgow Caledonian University, and a DPhil in “Uncertainty and Confidence in Predictions of Climate Change” again from Oxford University. He was co-founder and chief scientist of climateprediction.net – a large, public resource, distributed computing project designed to explore the consequences of model error in complex climate models. He has published on a diverse range of subjects including climate modeling and model interpretation, climate physics, nonlinear dynamical systems, the philosophy of climate science, climate economics, hydrology, geomorphology, etc.
His new book, Predicting Our Climate Future, has recently been published by Oxford University Press.