Chapter Six
Why Bottle Lightning?
6.0 A Different Kind of Model
We’ve now explored several significant challenges that climatologists must consider when attempting to create models of the global climate that even approach verisimilitude. The global climate is chaotic in the sense that very small perturbations of its state at one time lead to exponentially diverging sequences of states at later times. The global climate is also non-linear in the sense that equations describing its behavior fail both the additivity and degree-1 homogeneity conditions. They fail these conditions primarily in virtue of the presence of a number of distinct feedbacks between the subsystems of the global climate.
In Chapter Four, we noted that while energy balance models in general are useful in virtue of their simplicity and ease of use, they fail to capture many of the nuances responsible for the behavior of the Earth’s climate: while things like radiative balance are (generally speaking) the dominant features driving climate evolution, attending only to the most powerful influences will not always yield a model capable of precise predictive success. We saw how the more specialized EMIC-family of models can help ameliorate the shortcomings of the simplest models, and while the breadth and power of EMICs is impressive, there is surely a niche left to be filled in our modeling ecosystem: the comprehensive, high-fidelity, as-close-to-complete-as-we-can-get class of climate models. Coupled global circulation models[1] (CGCMs) fill that niche, and strive for as much verisimilitude as possible given the
- ↑ The term “coupled general circulation models” is also occasionally used in the literature. The two terms are generally equivalent, at least for our purposes here.
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