Philosophy Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Terminology: This section explains special features of the language used by the individual authors. _____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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Paul N. Edwards on Terminology - Dictionary of Arguments
I 12 Terminology/Edwards: Making global data: efforts to gather weather and climate records for the whole planet. Def Data friction: the effort it involves. I 13 Def Simulation models/Edwards: are based on physical theory. Even after atmospheric physics became adequate to the task early in the twentieth century, computational friction prevented serious attempts to simulate weather or climate mathematically. Reanalysis models: come from weather forecasting. These models also simulate the weather, but unlike pure simulations they constrain their results with actual weather observations. Essentially, they produce a movie-like series of global weather forecasts, blending observations with simulation outputs to produce fully global, uniform data. Climate statistics derived from reanalysis cover the I 14 whole planet at all altitudes, unlike data from instruments alone. Def Climate knowledge infrastructure/Edwards: systems for observing weather and climate originated in the nineteenth century, for the most part as national weather services. These developed as separate systems, but soon they linked their data reporting through loosely coordinated international networks. I 16 Climate knowledge is knowledge about the past. Def Metadata friction/Edwards: the difficulty of recovering contextual knowledge about old records. If you succeed, you find (perhaps) changes in station siting, faked logbooks, changes in instrumentation, misapplied standards, or a thousand other things that alter your understanding of the numbers in the records. I 17 Def Infrastructural globalism/Edwards: in the context of meteorology, this refers to how the building of technical systems for gathering global data helped to create global institutions and ways of thinking globally. Building global observing systems required creating global intergovernmental organizations, such as the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I 20 Def Climate sensitivity/Edwards: is a widely used benchmark for simulation experiments. Climate sensitivity is short for “how much the global average temperature will change when carbon dioxide concentrations double from their pre-industrial levels.” I 42 LTS: “large technical systems” approach to telephone, railroads, air traffic control, electric power, and many other major infrastructures. I 44 Gateway technologies and standards: spark the formation of networks. Using gateways, homogeneous and often geographically local systems can be linked to form heterogeneous networks in which top-down control is replaced by distributed coordination processes. The shift from homogeneous systems to heterogeneous networks greatly increases flexibility and creates numerous opportunities for innovation. I 51 Knowledge infrastructures comprise robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share, and maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds. I 470 Def Tuning/Edwards: “Tuning” means adjusting the values of coefficients and even, sometimes, reconstructing equations in order to produce a better overall model result. “Better” may mean that the result agrees more closely with observations, or that it corresponds more closely to the modeler’s expert judgment about what one modeler I interviewed called the “physical plausibility” of the change. >Parameterization/Climatology. I 574 Def Reproductionism/Edwards: reproductionism accepts computer simulation as a substitute for experiments that are not feasible on a global scale. It also accepts the use of data modeling as a control on heterogeneity in space and time. Once again, it’s “models almost all the way down.” In this very important sense, comprehensive model building is a central practice of global knowledge infrastructures._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Edwards I Paul N. Edwards A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming Cambridge 2013 |
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Ed. Martin Schulz, access date 2024-04-27