Abstract
Incorporating a prediction into future planning and decision making is advisable only if we have judged the prediction’s credibility. This is notoriously difficult and controversial in the case of predictions of future climate. By reviewing epistemic arguments about climate model performance, we discuss how to make and justify judgments about the credibility of climate predictions. We propose a new bounding argument that justifies basing such judgments on the past performance of possibly dissimilar prediction problems. This encourages a more explicit use of data in making quantitative judgments about the credibility of future climate predictions, and in training users of climate predictions to become better judges of credibility. We illustrate the approach using decadal predictions of annual mean, global mean surface air temperature.
Highlights
Climate prediction centres produce a large variety and number of climate predictions and update them fairly frequently for coordinated efforts such as phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5, Taylor et al 2012)
We encourage attempting to resolve this impasse by making more explicit use of available data to form quantitative predictions for the performance of climate predictions and thereby better informing decisions that depend on future climate
In this subsection we propose a third type of argument for justifying quantitative predictions of the performance of climate predictions
Summary
Climate prediction centres produce a large variety and number of climate predictions and update them fairly frequently for coordinated efforts such as phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5, Taylor et al 2012). We close this introduction by defining some of our terminology.
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