4.2 The Philosophical Significance of the Hierarchy of Climate Models
While the model we have just constructed is a working model, the like of which one might encounter in an introductory course on climate science, it still represents only a tiny slice of the myriad of processes which underlie the Earth’s climate. We went through the extended derivation of the last section for two reasons: first, to provide some structure to the introduction of central concepts in climate science (e.g. albedo, the greenhouse effect, opacity) and second, to demonstrate that even the simplest models of the Earth’s climate are incredibly complicated. The dialectical presentation (hopefully) provided an intuitive reconstruction of the thinking that motivated the ZDEBM, but things still got very messy very quickly. Let us now turn from this relatively comprehensible model to other more complicated climate models. As we’ve seen, the ZDEBM treats the entire planet as being completely uniform with respect to albedo, temperature, opacity, and so on. However, the real Earth is manifestly not like this: there is a significant difference between land, water, and atmosphere, as well as a significant difference between the composition of different layers of the atmosphere itself. Moreover, the shape and orientation of the Earth matters: the poles receive far less solar energy than the equator, and some of the energy that reaches the Earth is reflected in one location but not another, either by features of the atmosphere (clouds, for instance), or by the surface (white snow and ice is particularly reflective). Representing the Earth as a totally uniform body abstracts away from these differences, and while zero-dimensional energy balance models are useful as first approximations, getting a more accurate picture requires that we insert more detail into our model,[1] but what kind of detail should we add? How do we decide which parts of the world are
- ↑ It’s important to note that increasing the sophistication of a model is a necessary but not sufficient condition for generating more accurate predictions. While it seems intuitively apparent that more sophisticated models should be
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