Over the summer 2012, Professor Hayley Fowler, co-chaired a two-week workshop at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado on ‘Uncertainty in climate change research: an integrated approach’. Taking decision making as a starting point, the workshop focussed on: methods that facilitate consistent treatment of uncertainties in different parts of the climate change problem; accounting for additional factors outside quantifiable ones that contribute to uncertainty in decision making; accounting for the effect of cognitive biases that prevent consistency from one discipline to the next, and the critical differences in the end-to-end academic process vs. reality (i.e. practical application vs. theoretical approaches). The workshop comprised of a number of presentations from academics and practitioners from the UK and US, including Claire Walsh from CESER, who presented the group’s work on long term changes and integrated assessment in London. Participants came from a wide variety of disciplines: statistics, climate modelling and analysis, climate impacts, decision making, policy, communication, and social science concerned with vulnerability and climate change. An important and valuable component of the workshop was the participants working on mini research projects in interdisciplinary groups. Selma De-Brito Guerreiro, a PhD student in the CESER group attended the workshop as a participant.
