Abstract
It has been argued that climate modeling can be partially characterized as exhibiting ontic competitive pluralism (i.e., that models compete for truth in some sense). I argue that (1) because climate models are all of the same model-type, they are not ontic competitors; instead (2) they compete in terms of local skill. Counterintuitively, locally poor performing models sometimes yield epistemic benefits for scientists, as demonstrated by the emergent constraints literature.
