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Speaker: Ivan Sudakow, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The Open University
Title: Stochastic Modeling for Climate Tipping Points.
Abstract: The Earth’s climate contains “tipping elements” such as summer Arctic sea ice and permafrost, where gradual forcing can trigger abrupt and potentially irreversible change. Arctic sea-ice loss is proceeding far faster than most climate-model projections, while permafrost thaw may release large but uncertain fluxes of greenhouse gases. These critical transitions raise mathematical questions about stability, early warning, and predictability in high-dimensional, noisy systems. In this talk I will show how tools from stochastic modeling, statistics, and statistical physics—ranging from lattice spin-type models of Arctic sea ice geometry to reduced-order stochastic models of polar climate—can be combined with observations to constrain the likelihood of tipping events.