Speaker: Steve M. Easterbrook, University of Toronto

Abstract: 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, I will discuss my latest book, “Computing the Climate”, which aims to fill this gap. The book is written in an accessible style, suitable for a general audience, and is based on my extensive visits to climate modelling labs, and interviews with dozens of climate modellers. The first half of the book traces the history of climate science, from the first attempts in the nineteenth century to calculate how the Earth’s temperature would alter in response to changing levels of greenhouse gases, through to the birth of numerical weather forecasting and the discovery of chaos theory. The second half of the book describes the work of four different climate modelling labs (UKMO, NCAR, IPSL, and MPIM), which are used thematically to illustrate different aspects of modern climate modelling: the key design decisions when developing a global climate model; the challenges of coupling together models of different components of the climate system; the kinds of experiments these models support; and the processes by which they are tested and validated against observational data. The closing chapter summarizes what the models tell us about likely future climate change, and what will be needed to stay within the temperature thresholds adopted by the UN. I’ll end the talk with some thoughts about communicating climate science, and how we best to reach different audiences.

Bio: Steve Easterbrook is the Director of the School of the Environment and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. (1991) in Computing from Imperial College in London (UK), and joined the faculty at the School of Cognitive and Computing Science, University of Sussex. From 1995-99, he was lead scientist at NASA´s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility in West Virginia, where he investigated software verification on the Space Shuttle Flight Software, the International Space Station, and the Earth Observation System. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1999. 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 been a visiting scientist at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, in Exeter, the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado; the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, and the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris.
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