This week on the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Dr Tim Palmer. Tim is a Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, he is a senior fellow at the Oxford Martin Institute Programme on Modelling and Predicting Climate and a professorial fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. Tim is a major contributor to improving climate models and is among the researchers who won the 2007 Nobel Prize for authoring the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.

In October 2022 Tim Palmer's book ‘The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand our Chaotic World’ was published.  

0.00 Introduction

3.46 In your work we see what appears to be an intuitive approach to embracing uncertainty. Can we start there?

6.52 Is it true to say that our economic systems are experiencing more uncertainty and non-linear occurrences recently?

9.19 Can we talk about some of the most fundamental scientific concepts of uncertainty that you explore in the book, and how we might take some of that thinking to the challenges that we might be facing in running organisations? 

12.46 If we recognise that there will always be uncertainties, but also imagine a world in the future where there might be unlimited computing power where we have the singularity and an abundance of senses, does this increase in knowledge take us closer to a world with no uncertainty? 

18.44 Can you help us understand Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle?

21.48 If you could go back in time to the 2008 financial crisis, could you use some of what you know and have learnt about uncertainty to moderate that somehow? 

33.26 How widespread has the adoption of ensemble methods been?

35.13 Can we talk about ensemble methods, specifically focussing in on climate change? How has your work helped us to develop our current understanding of the world’s greatest challenge?

43.24 How do you see the science of uncertainty developing over the next decade?

47.34 Where do you see uncertainty sitting in the educational curriculum because currently it feels like it hasn’t been adopted into secondary education or across other fields?

51.04 Can you bring to life what a typical day looks like to you?

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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