An ongoing series from the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

A Dean's Lecture featuring

Scientists Tiffany Shaw, Gabriel Vecchi and Adam Sobel

Frontiers in Climate Science

Join us for a special seminar featuring three leading scientists. They will be discussing the improving regional climate understanding and translating scientific advances into information that society can use.

Tiffany A. Shaw
The Other Climate Crisis: Paths Forward
Climate science has made remarkable progress on global-scale predictions, a success that helped earn the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics. But as climate change becomes manifest at regional scales, discrepancies between models and observations are accumulating, and disruptive new approaches (kilometer-scale simulations and AI emulators) are challenging the assumptions underlying the field's dominant paradigm. I will argue that paths forward, including embracing discrepancies as scientific opportunities, revitalizing physical theory as an anchor for the model hierarchy, and applying a model-agnostic methodology for evaluating whether predictions are trustworthy, offer a route to the regional climate projections that society urgently needs to address tipping points, adaptation, and Earth system boundaries.

Gabriel Vecchi
Challenges/Opportunities in Understanding Regional and Extreme Events
Understanding extreme events at a regional scale in a climate context is both of societal interest and a natural test and extension of scientific understanding. However, this understanding is more challenging than that for spatial and temporal averages due to a relatively larger impact of internal variability, limitations in observational data, an underdeveloped fundamental understanding of the cross-scale processes, and impacts of model bias and inadequate process representation. Yet there is hope, the explosive growth in understanding of the hurricane-climate connection over the past 20 years provides lessons (and cautionary tales) of how to build this crucial understanding.

Adam Sobel
What Climate Science is Needed to Support Adaptation?
I’ll first argue that physical climate science can have the greatest near-term societal impact by supporting adaptation, and then go on to consider the implications of this for our field. Usable, adaptation-oriented climate science is co-developed with decisionmakers in a variety of sectors and regions, which leads to fragmentation and siloing. Can we synthesize across this landscape to produce a coherent field of usable climate science for adaptation, and if so what does that look like?