Two Mathematicians on the Politics of Climate Change

It will not have escaped the attention of any of the members of the IMA that there is a huge concern about the state of our changing climate. Not only do the changes in our climate affect all mathematicians, it is mathematics above all that can help us to understand our changing climate and give informed advice to our policymakers about both its impact and also how to mitigate against this. Indeed without careful mathematical models, informed by equally careful statistical data, we really have no way at all of predicting the climate with any degree of certainty into the future. It is good to know that many mathematicians, including IMA members, contribute to the regular reports made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. See [1] for more details. Recently, we have seen two big conferences on climate change, namely COP-26 on 31 October – 12 November 2021, followed by COP-27 on 6–18 November 2022. These were each attended by around 200 countries. All of the news reporting on these centred on the actions of the politicians and of climate activists. So where were the mathematicians? Well we were there (both face to face and online), making the case for using modelling and data-driven methods to inform the climate debate.