The power of mathematics to solve environmental problems

Overview

Over my career I’ve applied a variety of mathematical techniques to understand some of the world’s most pressing environmental problems. In this lecture I will survey these applications – from accidents at nuclear power stations to the ozone hole and climate change – and demonstrate the power of mathematics to quantify and thereby help address the environmental threats we face. But my experiences have also shown me how vested interests can delay necessary action, which I wrote about in my book Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial. Over time, this resistance has made me understand the need for words to add to that of numbers, to widen people’s perspectives and embrace the possibilities of a more sustainable future. The power of mathematics is not just in its quantitative capabilities, it is also in its potential to generate new stories of renewal and hope.

About the Speaker

Peter is Science Fellow in Attribution at the Met Office and Professor of Detection and Attribution at the University of Exeter. He is a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society.

Peter studied Mathematics at Durham University (BSc 1983), Part III Maths at Cambridge University (Master of Advanced Studies, 1984) and researched the environmental consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident for his PhD at Imperial College, London (PhD, 1988). He then investigated stratospheric ozone depletion in a post-doctoral position at Edinburgh University before joining the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1996 to work on the detection and attribution of climate change.

During his career, Peter has made important contributions to advancing the knowledge about how anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants are affecting our atmosphere and oceans. He led the team that provided the most important demonstrations to date (in 2000) that human activities were to blame for global warming. He also led the first study to link an individual weather event – the 2003 European heatwave – to human-induced climate change. He was a lead author of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (published in 2007) and a coordinating lead author of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (published in 2013). His current research is focused on the development of “operational attribution” systems to provide regularly updated assessments of extreme weather events and their links to climate variability and change. He has also had a long-standing interest in the communication of climate science to a wide variety of people. His book Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize in 2022 and he appeared on The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4 in 2024.

He was awarded the LG Groves award for meteorology in 2014 and the Climate Science Communications Prize of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2018. As well as being shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize, Hot Air was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Christopher Bland Prize. Peter was awarded the MBE in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to climate science.