David Stainforth

Title of the lecture

The science of human-induced climate change is profoundly different from the science of climate without human-induced change. It raises new, fundamental challenges that require us to reflect deeply on how we go about its study. This lecture will present a series fascinating questions that climate change raises for how we go about scientific research in a number of fields. It will argue for a substantial restructuring of how we study climate change - a restructuring founded on the need for much deeper integration between the diverse sciences involved, the related conceptual/mathematical/philosophical issues, and the relevant social science disciplines.

The lecture will be based on the recently released, popular science book: “Predicting Our Climate Future: What we know, what we don’t know, and what we can’t know.” It will begin by presenting a series of characteristics that frame the study of climate change and that need to be embedded in future experimental designs and funding initiatives. It will go on to discuss of how these characteristics lead to profound questions that challenge how we go about climate change research and make it as deeply, conceptually interesting as anything in science today; as interesting as the search for dark matter or the origins of consciousness. These questions relate to everything from the limits of our ability to quantify climate change from observations or within a computer model, to how close a model must be to reality to make reliable and detailed climate predictions, to how climate change science needs to be inherently guided by the social sciences in order to provide relevant and robust information.



To respond effectively to the threats posed by climate change the science needs to adapt to how it is being used across society.