Relevance of weather metaphors to existential unease

Correlating a Requisite Diversity of Metaphorical Patterns (Part #3)

---

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]

---

Models and metaphors: There is considerable debate about "climate change", paralleled by recognition of need for a "change of climate" -- metaphorically understood (Climate Change as a Metaphor of Social Change, 2008; Climate of Change Misrepresented as Climate Change: insights from metaphorical confusion, 2008). It is appropriate to recognize the contrast between understanding of "climate" (as a global technical and strategic focus) and understanding of "weather" (as people experience it locally and personally).

Curiously this contrast is partially highlighted by Paul Krugman in a discussion of Metaphors and Models (The Fall and Rise of Development Economics (2012, and elsewhere titled as The Rise and Fall of Development Economics):

The objective of the most basic physics is a complete description of what happens. In principle and apparently in practice, quantum mechanics gives a complete account of what goes on inside, say, a hydrogen atom. But most things we want to analyze, even in physical science, cannot be dealt with at that level of completeness. The only exact model of the global weather system is that system itself. Any model of that system is therefore to some degree a falsification: it leaves out some (many) aspects of reality. How, then, does the meteorological researcher decide what to put into his model? And how does he decide whether his model is a good one? The answer to the first question is that the choice of model represents a mixture of judgment and compromise. The model must be something you know how to make -- that is, you are constrained by your modeling techniques. And the model must be something you can construct given your resources -- time, money, and patience are not unlimited. There may be a wide variety of models possible given those constraints; which one or ones you choose actually to build depends on educated guessing....

Krugman then cites Dave Fultz, widely admired for his pioneering work on laboratory models of the general circulation of the atmosphere (through understanding of the patterns formed by rotating fluids in response to various mechanical and thermal forces):

Dave Fultz was a meteorological theorist at the University of Chicago, who asked the following question: what factors are essential to generating the complexity of actual weather? Is it a process that depends on the full complexity of the world -- the interaction of ocean currents and the atmosphere, the locations of mountain ranges, the alternation of the seasons, and so on -- or does the basic pattern of weather, for all its complexity, have simple roots? He was able to show the essential simplicity of the weather's causes with a "model" that consisted of a dishpan filled with water, placed on a slowly rotating turntable, with an electric heating element bent around the outside of the pan. ....

In fact, we are all builders and purveyors of unrealistic simplifications. Some of us are self-aware: we use our models as metaphors. Others, including people who are indisputably brilliant and seemingly sophisticated, are sleepwalkers: they unconsciously use metaphors as models.

What to do when the models are experienced as inadequate for engagement with reality?

---

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]