Given the statement that "climate model families are significantly more diverse" than in other sciences, what specific implications does this diversity have for validating climate science models and building trust in their projections, especially concerning foundational questions about reliability?

From the book

y discipline face in designing their models—and giving a general answer to them is beyond the scope of our project here. Still, it is worth our time to briefly examine the plethora of climate models that have sprung up in the last few decades, and to think about the conceptual underpinnings of this highly diverse collection of scientific tools. Perhaps we can at least suggest the shape of an answer to these questions with respect to climate science in particular. In practice, climate scientists employ a large family of models for different purposes. Zero-dimensional energy balance models like…

limate models is a symptom of science education and science journalism that has been left behind by scientific progress. The demands for more data, better models, further research, a stronger consensus, and so on would be perfectly sensible if we were dealing with predictions about a less complex system. Science is presented to the public--both in primary/secondary education and in most popular journalistic accounts--as aiming at certainty, analytic understanding, and tidy long term predictions: precisely the things that complexity theory often tells us we simply cannot have. Is it any…

for climate scientists to agree on a single model before we try to agree on policy, we are likely to be waiting forever. Climate scientists seem interested in diversifying, not narrowing, the field of available models, and complexity-theoretic considerations show that this approach is conceptually on firm ground. ​ Our policy-expectations must shift appropriately. This is not to suggest that we should uncouple our policy decisions from our best current models—quite the opposite. I believe that the central point that Will Wright makes in the quotation from his discussion of SimCity and…

els, and argue that the sense of “complexity” used in the climate modeling community is related to dynamical complexity. With ​ a clear understanding of the basics of climate modeling in hand, I then argue that foundational issues discussed early in the dissertation suggest that computation plays an irrevocably central role in climate modeling. “Science by simulation” is essential given the complexity of the global climate, but features of the climate system--the presence of non-linearities, feedback loops, and chaotic dynamics--put principled limits on the effectiveness of computational…

x systems buck this trend of convergence on a single model, and thus require a novel approach to policy decision-making. If there is any consensus at all in climate science, it is this: the window for possibly efficacious human intervention is rapidly shrinking, and if we don’t make significant (and effective) policy changes within the next few years, anthropogenic influence on the climate system will take us into uncharted waters, where the best case scenario—complete uncertainty about what might happen—is still rather unsettling. Critics of contemporary climate science argue that the…