II—Wendy S. Parker: Confirmation and adequacy-for-Purpose in Climate Modelling

By Wendy S. Parker. 2009

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Lloyd (2009) contends that climate models are confirmed by various instances of fit between their output and observational data. The present paper argues that what these instances of fit might confirm are not climate models themselves, but rather hypotheses about the adequacy of climate models for particular purposes. This required shift in thinking—from confirming climate models to confirming their adequacy-for-purpose—may sound trivial, but it is shown to complicate the evaluation of climate models considerably, both in principle and in practice.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba2897f97bdbb82ef263f7d84bdcc932db493fa8

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In Atmospheric Science

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

A climate model projection weighting scheme accounting for performance and interdependence (2017, background): “A way out, at least partially, is to reframe the competition of “which model is the best” to “which models are adequate for predicting X” [Parker, 2009].”
Skill and independence weighting for multi-model assessments (2016, background): “The weights should also be representative of the question at hand: skill is not a property of the model per se, but indicative of the ability of a model to project a certain change (Parker, 2009).”
Software Intensive Science (2014, background): “…most discussions of software in the literature have focused on determining whether and in what ways explanations derived from computational models differ from those provided by other kinds of scientific models (see for example Humphreys 1994; Guala 2002; Parker 2009; Winsberg and Lenhard 2010).”