Why climate storytelling is the antidote to unintelligible models

It’s time for a little more diversity in the climate analytics space.  There’s a suffocating orthodoxy favoring General Circulation Models (GCMs) which is stopping alternate approaches from getting the oxygen they need to thrive.  The result is a skewed view of encroaching climate risks and a growing mistrust of climate risk analysis as a discipline. 

That’s the gist of a new paper out of the American Meteorological Society by Marina Baldissera Pacchetti et al. Or to put it even more succinctly: “high-resolution GCMs are not the only game in town”, as co-author Erica Thompson argued on LinkedIn.

What are we talking about here?  And how does it relate to climate-related financial risk?  Well, GCMs have been ruling the roost for some time now.  These are tools used to simulate potential climate futures at a global scale, used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and various national and international research efforts – such as the European Union’s Destination Earth.

GCMs are firmly entrenched in the mainstream of climate science. As a result, a great deal of intellectual energy and money is being poured into improving this modeling approach.  Last year, for example, the Berlin Summit for EVE (Earth Virtualization Engines) proposed a network of research centers focused on souped-up GCMs at a price tag of €300mn per center, per year.