Climate modelling plays a crucial role for understanding and addressing the climate challenge, in terms of both mitigation and adaptation. It is therefore of central importance to understand to what extent climate models are adequate for relevant purposes, such as providing certain kinds of climate change projections in view of decision-making. In this perspective, the issue of the stability of climate models under small relevant perturbations in their structure (or small relevant ‘structural model errors’ with respect to the target system) seems particularly important. Within this framework, a debate has emerged in the philosophy of science literature about the relevance for climate modelling of the mathematical notion of structural stability. This paper adresses several important foundational and epistemological questions that arise in this context, in particular about the the role of abstract mathematical considerations of a qualitative nature (in some precise, topological sense) for concrete modelling projects with mainly quantitative purposes.

在减缓和适应方面，气候建模对于理解和应对气候挑战发挥着至关重要的作用。因此，了解气候模型在何种程度上适用于相关目的至关重要，例如根据决策提供某些类型的气候变化预测。从这个角度来看，气候模型在其结构中的相关小扰动（或与目标系统相关的小“结构模型误差”）下的稳定性问题似乎尤为重要。在这个框架内，科学哲学文献中出现了一场关于结构稳定性数学概念与气候建模相关性的争论。