Summit Statement from the “Berlin Summit for EVE”: an impassioned call for international cooperation to advance science and technology so that “Everyone knows how #climate and #ClimateChange affect them, and where this knowledge empowers them to act”.

It succinctly outlines how inadequacies and injustices in how climate information is developed and shared is leaving lives and livelihoods unnecessarily vulnerable to climate change: https://mpimet.mpg.de/en/communication/news/berlin-summit-for-eve-summit-statement #Eve4Climate #WarmWorld

Day 3 of #eve4climate: we tried to refine the vision and mission statements for EVE. We addressed scope, core values, key beneficaries, and delivery partners.

There will be a synthesis of the discussion, so I wont pre-empt that, but I there was more consensus than I expected around the vision, and I am hopeful that the core offering will be complementary to, and not in competition with, the rest of climate science. That wasn’t a given at the beginning of the week.

The final #eve4climate talk was from CERN about how CERN was established and their governance.

I was inspired enough to go look at the actual CERN convention (https://council.web.cern.ch/en/content/convention-establishment-european-organization-nuclear-research), which very tightly defines what CERN is for (check out article 2, “purpose").

The challenge for tomorrow will be to see if we can define the purpose of an “EVE” in such a way that it is a) deliverable, and b) distinct and complementary to (as opposed to "in competition with") the rest of climate science!

6/6

There was a change of pace in the afternoon of day 2 of #eve4climate.

There were two talks on observations (from space and on european research infrastructures), followed by some observations and lessons for EVE from DestinE, which were basically that we have underestimated the power of

1. Machine Learning: ML may well be the saviour of Digital Twins &
2. Industry: Big Tech companies may well be the saviours of the big tech tasks neeed for future climate.

(Are those controversial?)

5/n

The final talk in the morning #eve4climate was from Adam Sobel. His summary was succinct:

1) We need global, public tools, data & understanding to assess climate risks.
2) Climate adaptation finance is inhibited by the absence of such data, tools and understanding.
3) EVE has the potential to change this, by setting new standards.

His bottom line: if we make data widely available, there is a lot of scrutiny, and that leads to trust (even with known issues, they are at least known!)

4/n

The elsberg paradox is that people's decisions are inconsistent with expected utility theory. "It is generally taken to be evidence of ambiguity aversion, in which a person tends to prefer choices with quantifiable risks over those with unknown, incalculable risks.” (Wikipedia)

Of course that’s the situation we’re in with climate, people like to calculate risks with known imperfect models … and ignore the tail risks because we can’t get at them with our current models.

#eve4climate 3/n

That was from a talk by Peteri Taalas, the secretary general of the WMO, which was from the same #eve4climate session - where we also had a talk on the influence of climate (and human) change on the Amazon.

The next session jumped a bit towards commercial activities, where we learnt a lot about what Tencent (https://www.tencent.com) are up to, as well as how the reinsurance industry works. I copied lots of slides, but the one that resonated was the one on the Elsberg Paradox …

2/n

One more bonus from yesterday’s #eve4climate and Deborah Coen’s talk:

I’d never heard of Karl Kreil - an Austrial meteorologist (1789-1862) but apparently he said this:

"Everywhere there is a macrocosm and a microcosm, a world on the large scale and on the small - the latter just as important, often more important than the former”

Right up there with Lewis Fry Richardson and his bigger whirls … and so to viscosity!

About to head into day 2 of #eve4climate. Missing sessions from yesterday's summary included a vision talk by Jensen Huang of nvidia, one on HPC and one on “building human capacity”.

I hadn’t appreciated how all in Jensen himself (& hence nvidia itself) was on the importance of simulating climate. Their involvement goes way beyond “helping people use their kit”.

The HPC talks confronted the community with the reality of achieving 1km at 1SYPD - hard and expensive! But we knew that!

1/2

TIm’s talk for #eve4climate was less inspiriing. Tim Palmer is one of the GOATs of our field, but he’s out on a limb of his own with respect to negativity around what we already know (e.g from CMIP).

I do not believe we should be framing our arguments for going to higher resolution (which we absolutely should be doing) in terms of predictability (in analogy with NWP) - future climate is not “predictable” in the same way. While we have much useful to say, we are not making precautions per se.

Aromnar Ravi’s talk for #eve4climate was a real bresh of fresh air - from someone who has sat at the top table of international climate negotiations.

The bottom line was that while he had real criticism of the concept paper (https://owncloud.gwdg.de/index.php/s/rNWYNJSdJ19iwbJ), the context in which we were discussing the investment of a few billion (pounds/euros/dollars) was small compared with annual climate related losses in GDP (two thirds of a trillion pounds/euros/dolllars).

3/n

Day 1 of #eve4climate is done.

The first session had talks by
Bjorn Stevens, Debra Roberts, Aromar Revi and Tim Palmer.

They were all addressing the possibilities of the Earth Virtual Engines (EVE), an amibitious project to develop several global centres of excellence in climate science supported by exascale compute and analysis facilities.

The basic thesis is that if we push toward global models with 1-km resolution we will be able to provide much better global predictions of climate

1/n

Ousmane Ndiaye (National Agency for Civil Aviation and Meteorology, Senegal) providing a necessary perspective: the global south have to be participants *in* climate science not beneficiaries *of*. #eve4climate

Provocative question from Andrew Jones (@hpcnotes): would the EVE community (whatever that is) be happy to have the EVE HQ (whatever that might mean) in the global South?

Uneasy silence … #eve4climate

Will toot about the science and talks from #eve4climate later, but it was nice to hear one of the most influential technologists around congratulate the climate science community for their work.

(Standard disclaimer: Other technology companies and technologists are available)

Some days are exceptional. For us, it´s this whole week:

Together with many partners, the #WarmWorld project organized "The Berlin Summit", bringing together invited participants from across the world to draft a blueprint for EVE, envisioned as an international digital infrastructure that exploits the latest advances in #HPC and #AI to establish and maintain a global climate prediction and information system across regional partners or nodes. https://mpimet.mpg.de/en/communication/focus

#Eve4Climate @bmbf_bund

In Berlin for the #eve4climate meeting: https://eve4climate.org/. Lots more suit jackets than I am used to … you can draw a number of conclusions from that statement!

Given I complained about the paucity of #pasc23 tooting, I will have to do better!