Climate Models and the Irrelevance of Chaos

Abstract

Philosophy of climate science has witnessed substantial recent debate over the existence of a dynamical or "structural" analogue of chaos, which is alleged to spell trouble for certain uses of climate models. In this paper, I argue that the debate over the analogy can and should be separated from its alleged epistemic implications: chaos-like behavior is neither necessary nor sufficient for small dynamical misrepresentations to generate erroneous results. I identify the relevant kind of kind of sensitivity with a kind of safety failure and argue that the resulting set of issues has different stakes than the extant debate would indicate.