15 - Taking Climate Models Seriously, Not Literally

Summary

The media often lends more credence to dramatic predictions from individual climate models than does the climate science community as a whole. Models are metaphors of reality; they should be taken seriously, not literally. Predictions made by simple climate models need to be confirmed using more comprehensive climate models. Deep uncertainty surrounds estimates of climate metrics like climate sensitivity, meaning that the error bars presented with these metrics may have their own unquantifiable error bars. It is important to make the distinction between precision and accuracy when evaluating uncertainty estimates of climate parameters. Overconfidence in numerical predictions of extreme climate scenarios may lead to a “doomist” belief that a climate catastrophe is inevitable and that there is nothing we can do to prevent it.