MFC Friday at Reading on 28th February 2025

This MFC event had an informative talk from Prof. David Stainforth on “Predicting Our Climate Future: what we know, what we don’t know, and what we can’t know”:

Absract: 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 of course, but much of the science is young and history tells us that scientists can get things wrong before they get them right. Indeed, while the existence and the scale of the threat has robust foundations, 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. So how can we judge what information is reliable and what is open to question?

In this talk I will discuss my 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 interesting issue to study, before addressing some of the key challenges that researchers across multiple disciplines need to 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.

This was followed by a technical talk about conceptual issues on uncertainty in models and a toy model was given to experiment on.