Climate Risk Analysis with Josh Hacker from Jupiter Intelligence

Climate change poses significant risks and uncertainties, with far-reaching impacts on business operations, supply chains, and financial performance. By conducting a climate risk analysis, businesses can mitigate risks, develop savvy strategies, and masterfully manage and mitigate them.

Joining me today is Josh Hacker, an atmospheric scientist whose career has spanned diverse research and science management roles. Josh is also the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at Jupiter Intelligence, the go-to expert for organizations seeking to strengthen their climate resilience through climate risk analytics. Josh has made his mark in both academic and laboratory settings and is helping to meet private sector demands for comprehensive and accurate information on the costs of climate change for individual companies and market sectors.

In our conversation, we discuss why climate change is relevant for companies, what they can do about it, and how Jupiter Intelligence is leading the way. We unpack the various types of climate risks, the role of machine learning, and the validation process. Learn about the various uncertainties and errors in modeling, how to correct them, the role reanalysis plays, why a multidisciplinary team of experts is essential, and more.

Key Points:

• Background about Josh and why he decided to start Jupiter Intelligence.
• The work Jupiter Intelligence does and how it relates to climate change adaptation.
• Why climate risks are being taken seriously by the private sector.
• Discover the role of machine learning tools in assessing climate risks.
• An outline of the various challenges faced when working with climate models.
• Learn about his approach to model validation and why it is crucial. 
• Keeping a balance between model accuracy and explainability.
• Find out how model uncertainty and model errors are quantified.
• How bias manifests in climate models, and how to identify it.
• Josh shares advice for other leaders of AI-powered startups.
• What to expect from Jupiter Intelligence in the future.

Quotes:

“The vast majority of capital that we're using, and we will be using to adapt to climate change, is locked up in the private sector. But on the other hand, the government has a role in policy. These two things have an interplay that then feeds into the broader community.” — Josh Hacker

“The reality is there's no one way. [Validation] is a complicated process that you have to build on to make sure that things are working right all along the way.” — Josh Hacker

“The game in climate modeling is to actually pull the signal out from that noise. We want to pull out the slow stuff, how the climate changes, how the climate is changing relative to all the weather patterns that are going on underneath it.” — Josh Hacker

“Because of that historical period and the existence of these reanalyses, we have something we can do to correct the historical statistics of the climate models.” — Josh Hacker

Links:

Josh Hacker on LinkedIn

Jupiter Intelligence

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