Today’s climate scientists face a particularly daunting task: to estimate uncertainties associated with model-based projections of future climate change. But why is this so hard? Don’t scientists routinely attach error bars to their quantitative results? I will discuss why it is difficult to estimate uncertainties in the context of climate prediction, what it would mean to estimate them in an epistemically responsible way, and why many attempts made so far do not meet this standard. Though I focus on the case of climate prediction, the broader issue being explored is how we gauge the limits of our knowledge about the future.

This talk is co-sponsored with HSS.