A Changing Planet seminar given by Dr Tamsin Edwards, Lecturer in Physical Geography at King’s College London and award-winning communicator, and organised by students of the Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet DTP.
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Stories of extreme sea level rise
How soon will the ice apocalypse come? In 2016, an influential study made predictions for the Antarctic ice sheet response to climate change that would double previous projections for total sea level rise this century and change the shape of global coastlines over longer timescales. But how likely is such massive sea level rise, and why do projections vary so widely? I will discuss how different types of evidence – models, observations, reconstructions of the past, and expert judgement – have been drawn on to assess the possibility of rapid sea level rise, including our new reanalysis of the 2016 predictions that shows the story is not so simple as first thought.
Biography
Dr Tamsin Edwards is a climate scientist at King’s College London. Her research is in quantifying and reducing the uncertainties of climate predictions, particularly for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet contributions to sea level rise, using simple statistical ‘emulators’ of computationally expensive computer models. Tamsin is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (published 2021) and a contributing author of the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (published 2019). She regularly advises the Government Office for Science and Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology on climate science and its communication, including authoring the evidence review “Current and Future Impacts of Sea Level Rise on the UK” for Foresight Future of the Sea, and provides expert comment to national and international media including the BBC, Guardian, Huffington Post and Vice News. She is an award-winning communicator for her work through Twitter (@flimsin), PLoS blog “All Models are Wrong”, consultancy for the BBC, and science festivals such as BlueDot, including the Medical Research Council’s Suffrage Science Award, British Science Association Charles Lyell Award, and several nominations for Sense about Science’s John Maddox Prize for standing up for science.