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On Exactitude in Climate Science - Long Now

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Climate models could become infrastructure for our collective knowledge – but the choices we make in building these simulated worlds matter. By Kyle Barnes Feb 7, 02024 In July 02023, climate scientist Bjorn Stevens paused in the middle of a virtual talk about data and modeling to quote a short story by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. Borges’ work does not often come up in the context of climate modeling — but Stevens invoked him for a reason beyond idle literary fascination. Referencing “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges’ single-paragraph story in which an empire creates maps of ever-increasing size, until they perfectly match the territory they are mapping, Stevens warned of a looming crisis of scale occurring in the field of climate science. In Borges’ story, the map becomes useless in its magnitude; in climate science, the mad dash to reach kilometer scale climate simulations could make climate models too large to matter to the world outside of academia. How much data is too mu

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