Emily Shuckburgh and Chris Budd.

How do you go about predicting something as complex as the Earth's climate? In this podcast, first published in May 2021, climate modelling experts Emily Shuckburgh and Chris Budd help us explore what those climate models look like, the uncertainties involved in climate modelling, and also why the predictions need to be taken seriously despite those uncertainties.

We also look at the simplest climate model of them all— the energy balance model — and explain the famous butterfly effect in just one minute.

Emily Shuckburgh is a mathematician and climate scientist and Director of Cambridge Zero. Chris Budd OBE is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, who works on climate models. You can read Budd's Plus article about climate modelling here.

The podcast features clips from Emily Shuckburgh's talk at the Cambridge Festival, which was hosted by the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. You can watch the full talk here.

This podcast is part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI), an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. INI attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.