Climate Models for Guiding Action: Adequacy, Inadequacy, and the Ethics of Downstream Model Use

Date
Tue December 3rd 2024, 4:00 - 5:30pm
Event Sponsor
McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
Stanford Humanities Center
Location
Mitchell Earth Sciences
397 Panama Mall, Stanford, CA 94305
Hartley Conference Center
Experience Type
In-Person
The Facing the Anthropocene: Interdisciplinary Approaches workshop presents:
 
Climate Models for Guiding Action: Adequacy, Inadequacy, and the Ethics of Downstream Model Use
Eric Winsberg (University of South Florida) 
December 3rd, 2024 | 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. (PST)
Hartley Conference Center (397 Panama Mall, Stanford, CA)
 
Abstract: As concern about climate change intensifies, there is increasing demand for ‘actionable’ information to help mitigate to effects of climate change through sustainable policy. As this demand has increased, so has the complexity and resolution of Earth System Models (ESMs) and Global Climate Models (GCMs), which play a central role in generating this information. However, the increased complexity and resolution of ESMs/GCMs does not guarantee that they will offer increased adequacy-for-purpose in applied domains. This talk will review numerous recent case studies that highlight specific research questions that ESMs/GCMs cannot reliably answer, due to features that these models possess as a result of their development history and what is described as the problem of “pseudo-detail”. These include case studies of modelling surface water availability in the Upper Colorado River Basin, regional changes to precipitation regimes surrounding the Great Lakes, and red tide patterns in the Gulf of Mexico. The inadequacy of ESMs/GCMs for certain applied purposes raises the risk of downstream harm, what philosophers of science and modelling have called ‘representational risk’. Strategies for managing representational risk include implementing both tailored and general strategies to better communicate models’ adequacies and inadequacies for different purposes and increasing awareness of the ethical significance of potential climate model misuses. In a review of literature from climate science and philosophy of modelling, this talk will establishe the adequacy of ESMs/GCMs for a range of applied purposes and underlines the connection between model inadequacy and emerging issues in the ethics of climate modelling.
 
Bio: Eric Winsberg is a Professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida. His principal interests are in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of climate science, and the philosophy of physics. He is especially interested in the role of computer simulations in the physical sciences, and analog simulation in cosmology, and in the foundations of statistical physics and the direction of time. His work in the philosophy of climate science specifically relates to their application in science policy and ethics. He also writes on truth and on scientific authorship. Winsberg is the author of several articles on these topics that have appeared in such journals as Philosophy of Science, the Journal of Philosophy, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics and Synthese. He has held visiting fellowships at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld in Germany , and the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Durham in the UK, at the University of California, Berkeley, the MCMP in Munich and at the University of Lueneburg in Germany. He is the author of Science in the Age of Computer Simulation, which appeared in the fall of 2010 with the University of Chicago Press, and the co-editor of two forthcoming books; one on climate science and one on the arrow of time, with the University of Chicago Press and Harvard University Press, respectively.
 
This Workshop is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from an anonymous donor, former Fellows, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.
Event Link