Other UBC Event
Computing the Climate: How we know what we know about climate change
October 23, 2024, 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
Global climate models play a central role in climate science, drawing together broad inter-disciplinary teams to study how the atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets, and biosphere interact – and how their behaviours shift in response to changing levels of greenhouse gases. Yet few people outside the climate science community understand how these models are developed, tested, and used.
In this talk, Dr. Steve Easterbrook will discuss his latest book, Computing the Climate, which aims to fill this gap and is based on his extensive visits to climate modelling labs, and interviews with dozens of climate modellers. Dr. Easterbrook will also discuss some of his thoughts about communicating climate science, and how to best reach different audiences.
Steve Easterbrook is the Director of the School of the Environment and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. His research interests range from modelling and analysis of complex adaptive systems to the socio-cognitive aspects of team interaction. His current research is in climate informatics, where he studies how climate scientists develop computational models to improve their understanding of earth systems and climate change, and the broader question of how that knowledge is shared with other communities. He has worked at a variety of institutions as a scientist, including NASA’s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility, UK Met Office Hadley Centre, Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology, and more.