ABSTRACT
It is, of course, quite possible to develop and use environmental models without any explicit underlying philosophy. Many practitioners do, although most might have the aim of developing and using models that are as “realistic as possible”, given the constraints of current knowledge, computing capabilities and observational technologies. This type of implicit or pragmatic realism seems quite natural and appears to be intrinsic to modelling efforts such as the coupled Global Circulation Models being used to predict future climate change. The philosophical subtleties are not really necessary to the practising environmental modeller who only needs to know that achieving realism is still difficult in the practical prediction of complex environmental systems. Current implementations of such models are known to have their limitations but it is implicitly accepted that they will continue to evolve towards more realistic representations of the earth-ocean-atmosphere system.
