Abstract
Climate scientists frequently employ heavily idealized models. How should these models be interpreted? Some philosophers have promoted a possibilist interpretation, where climate models stand in for possible scenarios that could occur, but don't provide information about how probable those scenarios are. The present paper argues that possibilism is undermotivated, incompatible with successful practices in the science, and liable to present a less accurate than probabilistic alternatives. There are good arguments to be had about how to interpret climate models but our starting point should be that the models provide evidence relevant to the evaluation of hypotheses concerning the actual world.
