Modelling the Earth's climate mathematically is hard already. Now a new difficulty is emerging
“Science” is a recently coined word. When the Royal Society, the world's oldest academy of the discipline, was founded in London in 1660, the subject was referred to as natural philosophy. In the 19th century, though, nature and philosophy went their separate ways as the natural philosophers grew in number, power and influence.
Nevertheless, the link between the fields lingers on in the name of one of the Royal Society's journals, Philosophical Transactions. And appropriately, the latest edition of that publication, which is devoted to the science of climate modelling, is in part a discussion of the understanding and misunderstanding of the ideas of one particular 18th-century English philosopher, Thomas Bayes.
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Bayes was one of two main influences on the early development of probability theory and statistics. The other was Blaise Pascal, a Frenchman. But, whereas Pascal's ideas are simple and widely understood, Bayes's have always been harder to grasp.
Pascal's way of looking at the world was that of the gambler: each throw of the dice is independent of the previous one.
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