Affiliation:
1. Leibniz Universität Hannover
Abstract
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) often qualifies its statements by use of probabilistic “likelihood” language. In this paper, I show that this language is not properly interpreted in either frequentist or Bayesian terms—simply put, the IPCC uses both kinds of statistics to calculate these likelihoods. I then offer a deflationist interpretation: the probabilistic language expresses nothing more than how compatible the evidence is with the given hypothesis according to some method that generates normalized scores. I end by drawing some tentative normative conclusions.
Publisher
University of Michigan Library
Subject
General Earth and Planetary Sciences,General Environmental Science
Reference36 articles.
1. Bayesian Estimation of Climate Sensitivity Based on a Simple Climate Model Fitted to Observations of Hemispheric Temperatures and Global Ocean Heat Content;Aldrin, MagneMarit HoldenPeter GuttorpRagnhild Bieltvedt SkeieGunnar MyhreTerje Koren Berntsen;Environmetrics,2012
2. On the Meaning of Independence in Climate Science;Annan, James D.Julia C. Hargreaves;Earth Systems Dynamics,2017
3. Climate Change Assessments: Confidence, Probability and Decision;Bradley, RichardCasey HelgesonBrian Hill;Philosophy of Science,2017
4. Improving the Use of Calibrated Language in U.S. Climate Assessments;Crimmins, Allison;Earth’s Future,2020