Claudia Tebaldi
Joint Global Change Research Institute (PNNL)

Biography

Claudia Tebaldi has been working on climate change science since the early 2000s. She is a statistician by training and her work has centered around uncertainty characterization in future projections, with focus on changes at the regional scale, particularly in extremes. In the last decade her work has shifted increasingly to connecting the physical changes in the climate system to impact studies and risk assessment.

She joined the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a division of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory affiliated to University of Maryland in 2019 after many years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, and visiting positions at Stanford University and University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC.

She has worked as an author on the last three Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as part of Working Group I, on the physical science basis. She was an author of the 5^th US National Climate Assessment (NCA5), released in 2023. She co-chairs ScenarioMIP, which organizes the coordinated scenario simulations by the world’s climate modeling centers under WCRP. She maintains an affiliation to Climate Central, a non-profit, non-advocacy science-communication organization dedicated to educating the US public to the impacts of climate change and its solutions.  

Dr. Tebaldi is an elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Abstract: Integrated modelling of the Earth and human systems: progress, challenges, and outlook

Addressing global change requires a holistic consideration of the Earth and the human system interactions. Modelling of these two systems has historically happened with minimal coupling of the two, by climate models on the one side, energy, and impact models on the other. More recently, however, attention and efforts are directed towards understanding and modelling their joint behavior.  
A whole career can be spent studying the outcomes of climate models when run under future scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions, to characterize future changes in the climate system, both averages and extremes. Multiple models, multiple scenarios, and the intrinsic noise of the Earth system make this pursuit challenging with plenty of room still open for novel approaches and better understanding. Attaching numbers, best estimates, and uncertainty ranges, to any of these projections is still an open problem. (How much more intense, more frequent, longer will these extremes be? How much will be caused by our actions, how much will be the effect of natural variations in the weather? How much change can we save ourselves by mitigating our emissions?)
The problem becomes even more complex when we ask questions about the impact of climatic changes on the natural environment and societies: Impacts depend on changes in climate but also on the state of the human and natural systems that these potentially dangerous changes will affect. How many more people, structures, assets will be exposed? How more or less rich, developed, resilient will humans and what they care about be when the hazard strikes?  How much adaptation will have taken place?  And in addition, we need to consider the possible effects of these impacts on greenhouse gas emissions and land use, which is to say, we need to be concerned with potentially significant feedback loops from climate changes to impacts on human activity, back to climate again.
A truly multidisciplinary approach to the problem is needed, a collaboration between earth sciences and such diverse domains as economics, geography, agronomy, public health, water resource management, decision making. Models of energy, land, and water systems are used together with models of the climate system to better characterize holistic scenarios of future risk. In this talk, I will give an overview of some of the components of this complex problem, approaches, challenges, and promising directions of research.