Event Detail

Wed Mar 6, 2013
234 Moses Hall
6–8 PM
Working Group in the History and Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Science
Eric Winsberg (University of South Florida)
Climate model uncertainty and ambiguity aversion

There has been a great deal of emphasis, in recent years, on developing methods for quantifying uncertainty in the predictions of global and regional climate models. Such an approach would allow a division of labor between those who discover the facts and those who decide what we should value. And it is in line with a famous defense of scientific objectivity due to Richard Jeffrey. I argue, however, that value neutral probabilities for climate model projections will be hard to come by in the foreseeable future. In this paper I consider a variety of alternative proposals for presenting what we know about the future from climate models. I suggest that any such proposal ought to take account of “ambiguity aversion.”