Tamsin Edwards on the uncertainty in climate science
Discovery
BBC
4.3 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2021
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Certainty is comforting. Certainty is quick. But science is uncertain. And this is particularly true for people who are trying to understand climate change.
Climate scientist, Tamsin Edwards tackles this uncertainty head on. She quantifies the uncertainty inherent in all climate change predictions to try and understand which of many possible storylines about the future of our planet are most likely to come true. How likely is it that the ice cliffs in Antarctica will collapse into the sea causing a terrifying amount of sea level rise? Even the best supercomputers in the world aren’t fast enough to do all the calculations we need to understand what might be going on, so Tamsin uses statistical tools to fill in the gaps.
She joined the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 and is currently working on the 6th Assessment Report which will inform the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26. She tells Jim Al-Khalili about her life and work and why she wishes more people would have the humility (and confidence) to consider the possibility that they might be wrong.
Transcript
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| 0:40.6 | Have a listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:42.5 | Welcome to Discovery from the BBC. |
| 0:44.6 | I'm Jim Elkely and today I'm in conversation with another of the world's leading scientists. |
| 0:50.8 | Understanding how our planet will respond as the global climate changes is not an easy |
| 0:56.0 | thing to do. |
| 0:57.6 | When the best supercomputers in the world can't do all the calculations we'd like, fast |
| 1:03.3 | enough to inform some of the pressing policy decisions that need to be made. |
| 1:08.3 | Q. Tams in Edwards. |
| 1:11.2 | Tams in uses statistics to understand climate change. |
| 1:14.5 | She started her career as a particle physicist and switched to being a climate scientist in |
| 1:19.6 | 2006. |
| 1:21.3 | Her pioneering work on the Ice to Sea project explores the relationship between Antarctic |
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