In this talk Professor Tim Palmer CBE, Co-Director of the Programme on Modelling and Predicting Climate, will address three related questions.

Firstly, what are the physical reasons why predictions of climate change are necessarily uncertain?

Secondly, how can we communicate this uncertainty in a simple but rigorous way to those policy makers for whom uncertainty quantification may seem an unnecessary complication.

Finally, what is needed to reduce uncertainty about future climate change? For the latter, I will argue that the sort of inspiration and ambition that led to the Large Hadron Collider is now needed for the development of climate-change science.

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This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed4p7JYMYKs

About the speaker

Professor Tim Palmer CBE is Co-Director of the Programme on Modelling and Predicting Climate at the Oxford Martin School; Principal Investigator on the Oxford Martin Programme on Resource Stewardship; Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, University of Oxford; and Professorial Fellow at Jesus College.

His DPhil was in general relativity theory after which he moved into the field of weather and climate dynamics and prediction, first at the UK Meteorological Office and then at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts.In 2010 he returned to Oxford as a “2010 Anniversary” Royal Society Research Professor, one of the positions created to commemorate the Royal Society’s 350th Anniversary. He has been a visiting scientist at the University of Washington and was a Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge.

He has been involved in all five IPCC assessment reports, has coordinated two European Union climate projects, and was co-chair of the international scientific steering group of the World Climate Research Programme project (CLIVAR) on climate variability and predictability.He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003, and served on the Royal Society Council in 2008-9.In 2011-12 he was President of the Royal Meteorological Society.

He has served on a number of government committees looking at issues from climate adaptation to the role of science in helping mitigate the humanitarian impact of natural disasters. He served on a number of advisory committees, including the Met Office's Scientific Advisory Committee. He has won prizes from a number of learned societies and academies, in the UK and overseas, including the top prizes of the American and European Meteorological Societies. In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Professor Tim Palmer was awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours List 2015 for Services to Science.