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The Myopia of Imperfect Climate Models: The Case of UKCP09

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Roman Frigg ,
Leonard A. Smith  and
David A. Stainforth
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Abstract

The United Kingdom Climate Impacts Program’s UKCP09 project makes high-resolution forecasts of climate during the twenty-first century using state of the art global climate models. The aim of this article is to introduce and analyze the methodology used and then urge some caution. Given the acknowledged systematic errors in all current climate models, treating model outputs as decision-relevant probabilistic forecasts can be seriously misleading. This casts doubt on our ability, today, to make trustworthy, high-resolution predictions out to the end of this century.

Type
General Philosophy of Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 80 , Issue 5 , December 2013 , pp. 886 - 897
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Work for this article has been supported by the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy funded by the Economics and Social Science Research Council and Munich Re. Frigg further acknowledges financial support from the AHRC-funded “Managing Severe Uncertainty” project and grant FFI2012-37354 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN). Smith would also like to acknowledge continuing support from Pembroke College, Oxford.

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