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Jordan Peterson, climate change, and the many definitions of a scientific model - C C - May 3, 2022
https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2022/05/jordan-peterson-climate-change-and-the-many-definitions-of-a-scientific-model/
INTRO: It’s been an interesting time to be a modeller. The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was split among three modellers. Shortly thereafter Jordan Peterson haemorrhaged a string of words that roughly translated to “I don’t understand climate models and therefore they are wrong”.
Meanwhile epidemiological models have spent the past two years being derided in the tabloids. Much of the anti-science rhetoric around such issues as the pandemic or global warming reduces to “this result must be wrong because it is a ‘model'”, without more specific detail. But this generalised attack is illogical. For example, we know full well that Newton’s laws are not a complete theory of gravity, and yet numerical approximations of Newton’s equations guided space exploration.
So let’s stand back a minute and clarify what is a “model”, a “mathematical model”, and a “numerical model”, so we can better understand how climate modelling works... (MORE - details)
RELATED: All models are wrong