Can We Get Ahead of This, and Should We?: Timescales of Prediction and Their Beneficiaries

It’s an old question: does better information lead to better outcomes? It’s also a complicated question. It requires clarity about which outcomes we’re targeting, who decides on those targets, and how we define “better” in the context of significant uncertainty across timescales. These aren’t the kinds of questions that meteorologists and other Earth Scientists are typically trained to answer. But in an era of improving forecast capabilities and rapid environmental change, they are implicit to and sometimes explicit in the work that we do. Our decisions about how we define and pursue "actionable" climate science in conversation with other fields and decision-makers can have tremendous influence on adaptation priorities and views of what is possible.

This presentation will engage these questions from the perspective of a physical scientist stumbling through transdisciplinary collaborations on several continents. I will consider mechanisms of climate variability and their representation in models, applications of climate analysis and forecasts across timescales, and approaches to participatory systems analysis that both use and inform climate research. Topics include compound heat-drought hazards, seasonal forecasts of ecological and health risks, simulation of climate shocks propagating across human systems, and projection of potential equitable pathways under climate change.