Lessons learned from the ERC GlobalMass project

Sea level rise (SLR) is one of the most serious and certain consequences of global heating. Even if we curbed emissions immediately, SLR would continue for decades because of the thermal inertia in the oceans and other parts of the climate system. Predicting future SLR is, however, extremely challenging because of our limited understanding and observations of how the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets will respond to climate change. Understanding present-day and recent past SLR and its drivers can help reduce uncertainties in projections and be used to improve and constrain numerical models.

From 2016-2022, we were funded by the ERC to work on understanding and resolving the constituent drivers of sea level rise during the satellite era and before. Our research was primarily focused on improved understanding and partitioning of the components of SLR during a period where observations were sufficient to resolve the processes. But, within the project we also undertook a novel and unusual study to explore and characterise uncertainties in ice sheet projections using an approach called Structured Expert Judgement (SEJ). This is a probabilistic approach particularly well suited to High Impact Low Probability (HILL) events or processes, such as Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other hazards that are hard or impossible to predict using deterministic modelling. This also applies to ice sheet projections. SEJ is effective at capturing the epistemic uncertainty in these model projections. The research, published in 2019, received a huge amount of (social) media attention that placed it in the top 100 of all papers that year based on Altmetric. Over a period of a few weeks we undertook dozens of live and pre-recorded interviews for global media channels. Much of this exposure was useful and lead to further opportunity but some was also counter-productive, less than ideal and unhelpful. Some of the positives, included presenting our findings at multiple UNFCCC COP meetings, to diplomatic cores, development banks and the public. Here we review some of the key lessons learned from being in the spot light of the media and how to communicate complex, nuanced scientific arguments in a few sound bites or sentences to an audience that has no technical background and may even be, at times, quite hostile.