The epistemology of climate models and some of its implications for climate science and the philosophy of science

I bring out the limitations of four important views of what the target of useful climate model assessment is. Three of these views are drawn from philosophy. They include the views of Elisabeth Lloyd and Wendy Parker, and an application of Bayesian confirmation theory. The fourth view I criticise is based on the actual practice of climate model assessment. In bringing out the limitations of these four views, I argue that an approach to climate model assessment that neither demands too much of such assessment nor threatens to be unreliable will, in typical cases, have to aim at something other than the confirmation of claims about how the climate system actually is. This means, I suggest, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC׳s) focus on establishing confidence in climate model explanations and predictions is misguided. So too, it means that standard epistemologies of science with pretensions to generality, e.g., Bayesian epistemologies, fail to illuminate the assessment of climate models. I go on to outline a view that neither demands too much nor threatens to be unreliable, a view according to which useful climate model assessment typically aims to show that certain climatic scenarios are real possibilities and, when the scenarios are determined to be real possibilities, partially to determine how remote they are.     

From successful measurement to the birth of a law: Disentangling coordination in Ohm's scientific practice

In this paper, I argue for a distinction between two scales of coordination in scientific inquiry, through which I reassess Georg Simon Ohm's work on conductivity and resistance. Firstly, I propose to distinguish between measurement coordination, which refers to the specific problem of how to justify the attribution of values to a quantity by using a certain measurement procedure, and general coordination, which refers to the broader issue of justifying the representation of an empirical regularity by means of abstract mathematical tools. Secondly, I argue that the development of Ohm's measurement practice between the first and the second experimental phase of his work involved the change of the measurement coordination on which he relied to express his empirical results. By showing how Ohm relied on different calibration assumptions and practices across the two phases, I demonstrate that the concurrent change of both Ohm's experimental apparatus and the variable that Ohm measured should be viewed based on the different form of measurement coordination. Finally, I argue that Ohm's assumption that tension is equally distributed in the circuit is best understood as part of the general coordination between Ohm's law and the empirical regularity that it expresses, rather than measurement coordination.     

Value management and model pluralism in climate science

Non-epistemic values pervade climate modelling, as is now well documented and widely discussed in the philosophy of climate science. Recently, Parker and Winsberg have drawn attention to what can be termed “epistemic inequality”: this is the risk that climate models might more accurately represent the future climates of the geographical regions prioritised by the values of the modellers. In this paper, we promote value management as a way of overcoming epistemic inequality. We argue that value management can be seriously considered as soon as the value-free ideal and inductive risk arguments commonly used to frame the discussions of value influence in climate science are replaced by alternative social accounts of objectivity. We consider objectivity in Longino's sense as well as strong objectivity in Harding's sense to be relevant options here, because they offer concrete proposals that can guide scientific practice in evaluating and designing so-called multi-model ensembles and, in fine, improve their capacity to quantify and express uncertainty in climate projections.     

Stationarity tests in time series model building

Optimum non-parametric tests for stationarity of a stochastic process against location and scale shift alternatives are explored. Usefulnesss of these tests in detecting a suitable differencing transformation that reduces a non-stationary time series to a stationary one is illustrated with a number of previously analysed real life data.     

低维特征空间中基于旋转图像的三维环境模型配准方法

近年来,异类机器人之间(如飞行机器人和地面机器人)的协作成为机器人学研究发展的一个新的领域.异类机器人协作的难点之一是协作环境建模,而由于所获得的环境模型具有不同的观测视角和尺度,其环境建模中的模型配准是一个难点和关键.目前,能够适用于大视角差、大尺度差场景配准的方法并不多,基于旋转图像的配准方法被认为是一种可行方案,但其中存在的计算负担大和在野外环境中的鲁棒性差使得其也很难在实际系统中应用.基于此,面向三维点云环境模型,以旋转图像为基础,提出了一种新的基于低维特征空间的模型配准方法.首先,通过引入模型曲率、旋转图像熵值和激光反射强度3个特征构建了一个三维特征空间,得到候选对应点集合.然后,在候选对应点集合中利用旋转图像的方法查找正确的对应关系,实现模型配准.由于低维特征空间的引入,基于旋转图像特征的对应点搜索区域大大减小,因此算法计算效率得到了极大改善.同时由于引入的新特征与场景旋转图像特征的互补性,算法的鲁棒性和精确性也得到了提升.这些性能改进最后通过实验得到了验证.     

Making the abstract concrete: The role of norms and values in experimental modeling

Experimental modeling is the construction of theoretical models hand in hand with experimental activity. As explained in Section 1, experimental modeling starts with claims about phenomena that use abstract concepts, concepts whose conditions of realization are not yet specified; and it ends with a concrete model of the phenomenon, a model that can be tested against data. This paper argues that this process from abstract concepts to concrete models involves judgments of relevance, which are irreducibly normative. In Section 2, we show, on the basis of several case studies, how these judgments contribute to the determination of the conditions of realization of the abstract concepts and, at the same time, of the quantities that characterize the phenomenon under study. Then, in Section 3, we compare this view on modeling with other approaches that also have acknowledged the role of relevance judgments in science. To conclude, in Section 4, we discuss the possibility of a plurality of relevance judgments and introduce a distinction between locally and generally relevant factors.