Predicting Our Climate Future reviewed

We review Predicting Our Climate Future: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and What We Can’t Know by David Stainforth. Published 12 October 2023 | Hardback | £20.00 | 368 Pages | 9780198812937

Predicting Our Climate Future reviewed

This book is intelligent, accessible, well reasoned and working very hard to get it’s teeth into a complex but vitally important issue. Stainforth recognises that this is a complex issue and that we need to separate between definite conclusions, and possible outcomes.

The author is not in any way a climate denier, but does aim to tackle the complexity of the challenges that we are facing. While also effectively explaining how we have suffered from some predictions and extrapolations being based on more speculative data.

This book is a compelling read, and aims to carefully navigate between emotive declarations and clean expositions of where we actually are, and what the data is telling us. Stainforth aims to walk the reader through this calculations, the challenges of a moving baseline, and the difficulties of modelling what the consequences of all of this will be. At the same time it is written in a readable and accessible way. This ensures that the book can and should be read by as many people as possible, to ensure we are as well informed as possible.

With the recent pushback by populist leaning political parties in many countries around the world, it is important that net zero is not delayed or deferred any more than possible. While the cost of living now is important, it will be irrelevant if we have no planet to live on. Equally the rising costs of an unsettled and chaotic environment will generate far more devastation and damage if we do nothing to tackle climate change. An important book, well worth reading.

More about the book

What are the powers and pitfalls of our climate models today?

Climate change raises new, foundational challenges in science. It requires us to question what we know and how we know it. The subject is important for society, but the science is young and history tells us that scientists can get things wrong before they get them right.

How, then, can we judge what information is reliable and what is open to question?

Stainforth goes to the heart of the climate change problem to answer this question. He describes the fundamental characteristics of climate change and shows how they undermine the use of traditional research methods, demanding new approaches to both scientific and societal questions.

He argues for a rethinking of how we go about the study of climate change in the physical sciences, the social sciences, economics, and policy. The subject requires nothing less than a restructuring of academic research to enable integration of expertise across diverse disciplines and perspectives.

An effective global response to climate change relies on us agreeing about the underlying, foundational, scientific knowledge. Our universities and research institutes fail to provide the necessary clarity – they fail to separate the robust from the questionable – because they do not acknowledge the peculiar and unique challenges of climate prediction.

Predicting Our Climate Future takes the reader on a journey through the maths of complexity, the physics of climate, philosophical questions regarding the origins and robustness of knowledge, and the use of natural science in the economics and policy of climate change.

David Stainforth is a Principal Research Fellow at LSE, researching the philosophy of climate science, climate economics, climate modelling and climate decision making under deep uncertainty. After studying Physics at Oxford, David Stainforth worked on ocean modelling and then studied for a Masters on Environmental Management before working as a renewable energy consultant.

He returned to academia to pursue research on computer models of the atmosphere before joining Professor Myles Allen to develop the climateprediction.net project, a public-resource, distributed-computing project which engaged hundreds of thousands of people worldwide with climate modelling. He lives in Oxford.

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