Week 8

Knowability case studies

Justin's summary of last week (doc)

Background papers:

• Alley et al., making sense (pdf)
• Rahmstorf, role of ocean (pdf)
• Seager and Battisti (pdf)

The Game:

So here's the game we all agreed to play: Bill Gates has rowed across from Redmond, and has given you 100 million dollars to study abrupt climate change. He does not care about the details of what you do but it must be in the general area. You have a conscience and you want to do the best science you can.

In this game, what seems like the best way to make progress and to enhance understanding?

• What problems do you pick to tackle?
• How do you tackle those problems?
• What do you expect to be able to learn?

In other words, we are taking out Polya checklists out for a test drive, and we want to see what we learn by doing this. Lets try and get fairly detailed about the plans.

Justin suggested picking something quite specific like D/O events and thinking your way up or down the Polya 'tree of possibilities' and, I think, trying to evaluate that specific properties of that problem. That would be great

I also wanted to make sure that, in contrast to trying to explain a particular observation, that we also come at it from the perspective of understanding fundamental dynamics questions That is, are rapid changes in "circulation regime" (where you get to choose what this means) possible?

As ever, please send emails by Wednesday morning.