Integrated assessment: Rhetoric of models and perceptions of world futures
Résumé
Integrated assessment of climate change implies the construction of models describing the very complex interactions among economic processes, geochemical or geophysical phenomena and ecological processes at the Earth level. This attempt is unprecedented in the history of science. To build models of a unique, very large and extremely complex object, the whole Earth, supposes the definition of concepts allowing the comparison of these models through their structures and not only comparisons of their numerical results. The purpose of this paper is to give some preliminary elements of such a structural comparison.