Tamsin Edwards on the uncertainty in climate science
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2021
⏱️ 32 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.
Producer: Anna Buckley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I'd like to introduce myself. |
| 0:03.7 | My name's Stevie Middleton and I'm a BBC Commissioner for a load of sport podcasts. |
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| 0:40.8 | Hello, I'm Jim Arkelele and this is the Life Scientific. |
| 0:44.9 | The deal is I get to talk to some of the amazing men and women who are trying to understand |
| 0:49.4 | our world and to make it a better place and you get to find out what makes them get |
| 0:54.0 | out of bed in the morning. |
| 0:56.0 | As the pandemic continues to cause concern all around the world, there's another threat |
| 1:00.5 | to Planet Earth that hasn't gone away, climate change. |
| 1:05.1 | Understanding how our planet will respond as the global climate changes is not an easy |
| 1:09.3 | thing to do. |
| 1:10.6 | Even the best supercomputers in the world can't do all the calculations we'd like fast |
| 1:15.3 | enough to inform some of the pressing policy decisions that need to be made. |
| 1:19.5 | Q. Tams in Edwards. |
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