Speaker: Steve Easterbrook
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Title: Usable Climate Science
Abstract:
Sustainability is usually defined as "the ability to
meet present needs without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their needs". The current interest in
sustainability derives partly from a general concern about
environmental degradation and resource depletion, and partly from an
awareness of the threat of climate change. But to many people, climate
change is only a vague problem, and to some people (e.g. about half the
US population) it isn't regarded as a problem at all. There is a
widespread lack of understanding of the core scientific results of
climate science, and the methodology by which those results are
obtained - which in turn means that the public discourse is dominated
by ignorance, polarization, and political point scoring. In this
environment, lobbyists can propagate misinformation on behalf of
various vested interests, and people decide what to believe based on
their political worldviews, rather than what the scientific evidence
actually says. The chances of getting sound, effective policy in such
an environment are slim.In this talk, I
will argue that we cannot properly address the challenge of climate
change unless this situation is fixed. Furthermore, I'll argue that the
core problem is a usability challenge: how do we make the science
itself accessible to the general public? The numerical simulations of
climate developed by climatologists are usable only by people with PhDs
in climatology. The infographics used to explain climate change in the
popular press tend to be high design and low information. What is
missing is a concerted attempt to get the core science across to a
general audience using software tools and visualizations in which
usability is the primary design principle. In short, how do we make
climate science usable? Unless we do this, journalists, politicians and
the public will be unable to judge whether proposed policy solutions
are viable, and unable to distinguish sound science from
misinformation. I will illustrate the talk with some suggestions of how
we might meet this goal.
Bio: Steve Easterbrook is a Professor of Computer Science at
the University of Toronto, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Computing
from Imperial College in London (UK), in 1991, on the topic of
requirements negotiation for complex socio-technical systems analysis.
His first faculty position was at the School of Cognitive and Computing
Science, University of Sussex, where he co-designed and was the first
course director for a new degree program in Human-Centered Software
Design. In 1995 he moved to the US to lead the research team at NASA´s
Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility in West
Virginia, where he investigated software verification on the Space
Shuttle Flight Software, the International Space Station, the Earth
Observation System, and several planetary probes. He moved to the
University of Toronto in 1999, where he now teaches courses in
empirical research methods, software engineering, and requirements
analysis.
Registration/Refreshments at 7:00pm; Presentation starts at 7:15pm. Free for everyone though we encourage you to join for $20/year. For more information go to: http://www.torchi.org/