Science, Society, and Computation: Building Trust Across Scales — from Climate Models to LLMs
Reto Knutti (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
When Nobel price winner Suki Manabe built his first climate model in the late sixties, he only had a few megabytes of memory. He could not imagine the scale of computing and the magnitude of data we have today. Yet he gained crucial insight into how feedbacks in the atmosphere will affect the patterns of climate change we are observing today.
Science on weather and climate has come a long way since then. As we continue to push frontiers of modelling atmospheric processes in finer details and computing at higher resolutions, what will we learn tomorrow? How much more do we need to know for informed decisions? How much are we willing to invest in new technology, and what are the benefits to us, and to the coming generations?
From a time when knowledge was a privilege of a few, we have entered an era where information is over-abundant. Machine Learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful technologies, but they also come with potential hazards. How do we separate true insight and understanding from noise? How do we ensure trust in models, predictions, science, and institutions? These are open questions for the unprecedented era we have entered. This lecture is aimed at the broad public and sketches how computing and data continue to transform the way we interact with science, models, and scenarios in an increasingly complex world.
Reto Knutti is Professor of Climate Physics at ETH Zurich and chairs the Center for Climate System Modelling. By combining understanding of processes, observational data, climate model simulations and advanced statistical methods, he has made significant contributions to quantifying human contributions to observed climate trends and improving future climate projections. He served as a lead and coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports and coordinated Swiss Climate Scenario Reports. As a speaker and prominent public voice, he regularly engages with policymakers, business leaders, and the media on climate action, sustainability and the role of and trust in science in society.
