In an influential paper, Wendy Parker argues that agreement across climate models isn’t a reliable marker of confirmation in the context of cutting-edge climate science. In this paper, I argue that while Parker’s conclusion is generally correct, there is an important class of exceptions. Broadly speaking, agreement is not a reliable marker of confirmation when the hypotheses under consideration are mutually consistent—when, e.g., we’re concerned with overlapping ranges. Since many cutting-edge questions in climate modeling require making distinctions between mutually consistent hypotheses, agreement across models will be generally unreliable in this domain. In cases where we are only concerned with mutually exclusive hypotheses, by contrast, agreement across climate models is plausibly a reliable marker of confirmation.

温迪·帕克在一篇有影响力的论文中认为，在尖端气候科学的背景下，气候模型的一致性并不是可靠的确认标志。在本文中，我认为虽然帕克的结论总体上是正确的，但有一类重要的例外。从广义上讲，当所考虑的假设相互一致时（例如，当我们关注重叠范围时），一致性并不是确认的可靠标志。由于气候模型中的许多前沿问题需要区分相互一致的假设，因此模型之间的一致性在该领域通常是不可靠的。相比之下，在我们只关心相互排斥的假设的情况下，气候模型之间的一致似乎是可靠的确认标志。