CMCSU · Climate Models and Climate Scientific Understanding

Climate Models and Climate Scientific Understanding

Climate change is one of the defining problems of our time. As stated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of Working Group 1 (WG1), “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land,” and these anthropogenic-induced changes are “already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.” Successfully addressing this problem necessitates an unprecedented level of scientific, public, and policy engagement and collaboration. There are reasons to believe that the success of the efforts to deal with the climate change problem hinges on a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of climate change by all involved. As it is emphasized, for instance, in the IPCC’s AR6 “Responses to climate change are facilitated when leaders, policymakers, resource managers, and their constituencies share a basic understanding of the causes, effects, and possible future course of climate change.” Therefore, a crucial question for everyone interested in this topic is: what does it take for all parties with a vested interest or role in the climate change dialogue to achieve an understanding of climate change? Particularly, why is it important for scientists to understand, rather than merely know, how Earth’s climate system works? This last question was the main problem that the CMCSU project was concerned with. The aim of the project was to develop an account of climate scientific understanding, i.e. of the way in which understanding of Earth’s climate system is pursued and achieved in climate science. The project was structured around three main objectives: - Objective 1 focuses on arguing that there is more to understanding in climate science than what is provided by highly idealized and simplified conceptual climate models. - Objective 2 involves analysing climate models to determine their explanatory power and whether they can contribute to understanding the climate system in non-explanatory ways. - Objective 3 aims to develop a comprehensive account of climate scientific understanding and the means by which it can be achieved, thereby enhancing the practice of climate science.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union