Climate Change, Catastrophe and Uncertainty

Dr Dave Frame

Climate change represents a substantial risk to many people in both the developed and developing worlds. In recent years, people have begun discussing mechanisms through which these risks could be amplified many times, to the extent that climate change may present an existential risk to humanity. At the same time, such speculations lie sufficiently far outside the established corpus of scientific knowledge that many informed commentators lament the rise of such a "catastrophic climate change" discourse. In this talk I will review the evidence for such existential risks, and discuss this in the context of the uncertainty inherent in environmental modelling.