Calendar of Activities

Lecture summary: Ed Lorenz's pioneering work on chaos was motivated by a skepticism about the use of simple statistical models to predict next month's weather. And yet scientists today attempt to predict our climate a year ahead, a decade ahead, and even a century ahead! Is this a futile waste of time and resources, or is there some scientific basis to the long-term prediction of what is a fundamentally chaotic system? As well as trying to answer these basic questions, Professor Timothy Palmer will discuss the key sources of uncertainty in making such predictions, how we estimate their impact, and how we might reduce forecast uncertainties. He will conclude by trying to assess what Lorenz's work on unpredictability implies about confidence in predictions of climate change produced by human activities.