Climate Models

Abstract

Climate computer models are irreplaceable scientific tools to study the climate system and to allow projections of future climate change. They play a major role in IPCC reports, underpinning paleoclimate reconstructions, attribution studies, scenarios of future climate change, and concepts such as climate sensitivity and carbon budgets. While models have greatly contributed to the construction of climate change as a global problem, they are also influenced by political expectations. Models have their limits, they never escape uncertainties, and they receive criticisms, in particular for their hegemonic role in climate science. And yet climate models and their simulations of past, present and future climates, coordinated via an efficient model intercomparison project, have greatly contributed to the IPCC’s epistemic credibility and authority.