Developing climate science and economics

Research programme 1 aims to improve our understanding of the nature of the uncertainties in complex climate models, to help policy makers manage the risks and uncertainties of climate change policy and balance their investments in adaptation and mitigation.

Over the last 20 years, climate models have been developed to an impressive degree of complexity, and have become core tools in the study of human-induced climate change. Quantitative climate predictions have come to motivate efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and they have also assumed a pivotal role in planning adaptation to climate change.

But significant uncertainty remains in predicting future climate change, even using the most complex computer simulation models. In spite of recent progress in quantifying our uncertainty about future climate change, fundamental questions remain about the validity and reliability of evidence from complex climate models. In fact, it is not at all clear that even the most sophisticated of today's complex climate models can provide decision-relevant probabilities.

The programme is comprised of a number of individual projects:

• Project 1a (i and ii) asks what today's climate models can really tell us;
• Project 1b (i and ii) goes on to investigate the implications of this for decision making on climate change, especially using economic methods;
• Project 1c examines innovative methods of communicating the complexity of climate predictions to a range of users.

Research programme 1 occupies a pivotal position in the work of the entire Centre, by clarifying the rules of evidence use in research programmes 2, 3 and 4.