Communicating Uncertainty to Policymakers: The Ineliminable Role of Values

In Elisabeth A. Lloyd & Eric Winsberg (eds.), Climate Modelling: Philosophical and Conceptual Issues. Springer Verlag. pp. 381-412 (2018)
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Abstract

Climate science evaluates hypotheses about the climate using computer simulations and complex models. The models that drive these simulations, moreover, represent the efforts of many different agents, and they arise from a compounding set of methodological choices whose effects are epistemically inscrutable. These facts, I argue in this chapter, make it extremely difficult for climate scientists to estimate the degrees of uncertainty associated with these hypotheses that are free from the influences of past preferences—preferences both with regard to importance of one prediction over another and with regard to avoidance of false positive over false negatives and vice versa. This leaves an imprint of non-epistemic values in the nooks and crannies of climate science.

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Eric Winsberg
University of South Florida

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Value management and model pluralism in climate science.Julie Jebeile & Michel Crucifix - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (August 2021):120-127.

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