Eleanor Babcock
10/9/15
Climate Modeling


This week in class, we discussed how the world became a system and how our worldly system and infrastructure relates back to climate change and how we discuss climate change. Jerome Whitington divides up our climate change into three different categories which analyzes the speculative anthropology of climate change.The Fingerprint, Bellweather and Model Event are his three components of climatic anthroploogy. They all are important and all link together in our understanding of climate change.

The Fingerprint is defined by our information problem, our collection of data and our concrete evidence. This data and evidence is the "fingerprint" of climate change on our planet. This is important in climate modeling because it gives us our information in a concrete fashion. We can have more meaningful exchanges about the science behind climate change, or about the policies which we institute for climate change through the implication of evidence and data revolving around the warming of the planet.

Bellweather is generally termed as a predictor or indicator of change. It tends to be related to the patterns we see in the fingerprint, or weather patterns, rather than the hard data. through bellweather we can assess the big problems versus the little problems and prepare for change. In terms of climate change, bellweather helps us gage what we should focus on in terms of initial steps to reduce emissions and later steps.

Model Event is an event which has happened in the real world which has the potential to understand climate change situationally. It gives us ethical motives to fix problems which we already see occurring.  It gives climate change a solid meaning and proportions it with varying degrees of intensity.

These three different categories are all helpful in modeling climate change for current understanding of the risks we face if we do not act. They give us speculation, results which we see and analyze so we can anticipate and plan ahead for the worst to come.