Reasoning in the Presence of Uncertainty in Weather and Climate

Predictive statements about climate and the weather show up daily in headlines and on one’s phone. They inform decisions about every-day matters, about how to respond to extreme weather, and about how to prepare for a changing climate. These statements always carry with them uncertainty: in what willl happen, and in how we should respond.

In spring of 2025 I taught a graduate seminar exploring a range of issues around how to understand, how to quantify, and how to reason in the presence of the uncertainy that is ubiquitous in discussions of weather and climate. For instance, the figure shows a plot from Lehner and Deser (2023) showing a decomposition of uncertainty in projections of global mean temperature rise into contributions from unpredictability of internal climate variability, uncertainty in future emissions pathways, and uncertainty in our understanding of the climate system's response to given forcings.

I intend to further develop this course into a more regular offering, although just what form it will take is still undecided.