Tuesday 24th January 2012
The role of uncertainty in adapting to the impacts of climate change within Scotland
ICMS, 15 South College Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AA
Meeting starts 6pm, tea and coffee from 5.30pm
Annual general meeting follows at 7pm - all are welcome
Dr. Joseph Hagg (Adaptation Scotland / Scottish Environment Protection Agency)
Probabilistic climate projections (UKCP09) - more than two years on...
The UK Climate Projections (UKCP09) are the latest generation of climate information for the United Kingdom, and for the first time provide a measure of uncertainty in the range of possible climate outcomes. However, more than two years after their release there remain significant challenges in using these probabilistic projections to both communicate climate change and inform decision-makers. I'll introduce UKCP09 and provide a few examples of how they challenge us to think about uncertainty in our future climate.
Dr. David Jenkins (Urban Energy Research Group, School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University)
The probability of building 'failure' due to future climate change
The latest UK Climate Projections (UKCP09) provide an indication of future climates in a probabilistic format; that is, they allow the inherent uncertainty of climate models to be expressed in the output of a weather generator. This weather generator provides the user with a range of climate parameters (temperature, solar radiation, humidity etc) for a range of probabilities across different future climate scenarios. The data is therefore vast and requires appropriate management if focussing this information on a specific application. One application of climate information is for building simulation. Typically, someone simulating the thermal performance of a building will use a single reference climate to assess that building. UKCP09 requires a different approach that is potentially time-consuming, namely multiple simulations of hundreds (or even thousands) of climate files. To reduce the computational time of such an exercise, the Low Carbon Futures project (funded by the Adaptation and Resilience in a Changing Climate Programme) has developed an algorithm that, once calibrated on a single simulation, can emulate multiple simulations in an efficient way for a given building. This raises the possibility that the quantified uncertainty provided in UKCP09 can be translated into uncertainty in building performance. Specifically, for the Low Carbon Futures project, this uncertainty is applied to a future overheating risk analysis, indicating the probability that a building might exceed certain overheating criteria as a result of a warmer climate.
Prof. David Elston (Director of Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland; leader of the Signficance, Risk and Uncertainty Workstream of ClimateXChange)
Sources of variation and uncertainty in models of the impacts of climate change
The UKCP09 web interfaces allows users to create sequences of simulated weather data for a 5km by 5km square for a specified 30-year period. Sequences can be obtained that correspond to one of 10,000 climate samples for each of three emissions scenarios. We have investigated the use of these weather simulations to drive process-based, dynamic crop-environment models for silage production, spring barley and short-rotation coppice. I will describe some of the statistical aspects of this project, including the use of strata in the selection of climate samples and the partitioning of variance in the simulated yields into components associated with the strata, with the climate samples within strata, and with year-to-year variations in weather within climate samples.
Tuesday 27th March 2012
How much does statistical illiteracy cost?
David Walker, Director getStats and John Pullinger, Chair, getStats Campaign Board and RSS President-elect
ICMS, 15 South College Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AA
Meeting starts 6pm, tea and coffee from 5.30pm
getStats is the Royal Statistical Society's numeracy campaign. The talk will draw on evidence on the misunderstanding of frequency, risk and probability and will chart the potential cost of such misunderstanding - in the consumption of collective goods such as health and education and in commercial markets. It will then turn to modeling the benefits of higher levels of statistical literacy on productivity and resource allocation. The talk will outline the ambitions of the getStats campaign, noting challenges to, and opportunities for, professional statisticians in widening public understanding of the application of statistical techniques. It will be followed by a discussion to identify priorities in Scotland for improving statistical literacy.
BiographiesDavid Walker is a communications professional, with extensive experience in journalism, research, public affairs and marketing. He is Director of getstats, the Royal Statistical Society's numeracy campaign and contributing editor of the Guardian's Public Leaders Network. Until 2010 he was Managing Director, Communications and Public Reporting, at the Audit Commission. He is a Council Member of the Economic and Social Research Council, visiting professor at King's College London, and was formerly a trustee of the Nuffield Trust for health services research.
John Pullinger is the Chair of the getStats Campaign Board and President-elect of the RSS. He is an RSS Council member, former chair of the RSS National Statistics Working Party and member of the RSS Long-Term Strategy Group. His day job is House of Commons Librarian, and prior to taking up that post in 2004 he was an Executive Director at the Office for National Statistics. He has also chaired Advisory Boards for departments and programmes at the Universities of Manchester, Essex and Leeds.