Stability, Robustness Reasoning, and Measuring the Human Contribution to Warming

In principle, inaccuracies in the representation of the climate’s internal variability could undermine the measurement of the human contribution to warming. Equally in principle, the success of the measurement practice could provide evidence that our assumptions about internal variability are correct. I argue that neither condition obtains: current measurement practices do not provide evidence for the accuracy of our assumptions precisely because they are not as sensitive to inaccuracy in the representation of internal variability as might be worried. I end by drawing some lessons about stability and “robustness reasoning” more generally.