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 system being modeled? It seems to me that the implication is not so dire as Lupo and Kinimouth make it out to be. This is one sense in which the pragmatic idealization approach shares something in common with Norton’s story--when we create any climate model (but especially a CGCM like the GISS), we have done more than approximate the behavior of the climate system. We’ve created a novel system in its own right: one that we hope we can study as a proxy for the climate itself. The objection that there are aspects of that novel system that have no direct analogue in the global climate itself is as misguided as the objection that no climate model captures every aspect of the climate system. The practice of model building--the practice of pragmatic idealization--involves choices about what to include in any model, how to include it, what to leave out, and how to justify that exclusion. These questions are by no means trivial, but neither are they insurmountable.

6.3.5 Ensemble Modeling and CGCMs

Our discussion so far has focused on the advantages of studying feedback-rich nonlinear systems via computational models: numerical approximation of the solutions to large systems of coupled nonlinear differential equations lets us investigate the global climate in great detail, and through the use of equations derived from well-understood low-level physical principles. However, we have said very little so far about the connection between chaotic behavior and computational modeling. Before we turn to the criticisms of this approach to modeling, let’s say a bit about how simulation is supposed to ameliorate some of the challenges of chaotic dynamics in the climate.

Chaos, recall, involves the exponential divergence of the successors to two initial conditions 210