Is reliable climate change information ‘predictably uncertain’?

Abstract

Recent discussion suggests that uncertainty in climate models’ representation of the interaction between external radiative forcing and internal variability prevents scientists from reliably providing local (or regional) climate change information anytime soon. In this paper, I articulate ‘predictable uncertainty’ as an epistemic criterion of reliable climate change information: the ability of climate scientists to systematically characterize and constrain the uncertainty envelope associated with their epistemic situation. There are two related implications. First, internal variability can be an informative signal for future climate change, and controlling for it can help identify the scales at which climate model-based or climate model-supported information may be reliable. Second, the reliability of local climate change information should be evaluated based not primarily on the amount of uncertainty in the interaction between the forced response and internal variability, but rather on climate scientists’ ability to characterize and constrain that uncertainty.