Abstract
Climate modelling plays a crucial role for understanding and addressing the climate challenge, in terms of both mitigation and adaptation. It is therefore of central importance to understand to what extent climate models are adequate for relevant purposes, such as providing certain kinds of climate change projections in view of decision-making. In this perspective, the issue of the stability of climate models under small relevant perturbations in their structure (or small relevant ‘structural model errors’ with respect to the target system) seems particularly important. Within this framework, a debate has emerged in the philosophy of science literature about the relevance for climate modelling of the mathematical notion of structural stability. This paper adresses several important foundational and epistemological questions that arise in this context, in particular about the the role of abstract mathematical considerations of a qualitative nature (in some precise, topological sense) for concrete modelling projects with mainly quantitative purposes.
Highlights
Climate modelling plays a crucial role for understanding and addressing the climate challenge, in terms of both mitigation and adaptation
Part of the reasons may come from the fact that the rather abstract and involved mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory underlying structural stability issues is quite far removed from the concerns of the working climate scientists and climate modellers (these questions tend to be confined to the sub-community interested in the mathematical foundations of climate science and climate modelling, see e.g. Ghil et al (2008) and Majda et al (2010)) and from the fact that the concrete impact of these issues can be rather difficult to quantify
This paper aims to highlight the epistemic relevance of structural stability considerations within the framework of climate modelling
Summary
Climate modelling plays a crucial role for understanding and addressing the climate challenge, in terms of both mitigation and adaptation. This article belongs to the Topical Collection: EPSA2019: Selected papers from the biennial conference in Geneva Guest Editors: Anouk Barberousse, Richard Dawid, Marcel Weber
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