Over the last decade, debates about climate change have been omnipresent on global political and scientific stages, as at the UN conferences in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997. The Working Group I of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), an international panel of specialists on climate change, has emerged as a highly respected and influential institution, prophesying with increasing confidence a future characterized by rising atmospheric temperatures due to anthropogenic causes.

Participants :

James R. Fleming (Colby College, Maine)
Robert M. Friedman (University of Oslo)
Rudolf Brazdil (Masaryk University, Brno)
Gregory T. Cushmann (University of Kansas)
Amy Dahan (Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris)
Pierre Deceuninck (Joint Research Centre, ISPRA)
Matthias Dörries (ULP, Strasbourg)
Fabrice Flipo (INRETS, Paris)
Rüdiger Glaser (University of Heidelberg)
Matthias Heymann (Munich Center for History of Science)
Cornelia Lüdecke (Munich Center for History of Science)
Christophe Masutti (ULP; Strasbourg)
Matt Price (University of Toronto)
Hans von Storch (Institute for Coastal research, Hamburg)

The workshop proposed here aims neither to reiterate current debates about the extent and meaning of climate change, nor to give advice to policy makers. The goal is rather to look more closely at what makes the field of climate change stand out in the current scientific landscape. One key may lie in the way current climate change studies engage simultaneously with the past, the present, and the future. Analysis of the past (of both the earth and of the discipline itself) is crucial for separating anthropogenic signals from the noise of natural variations. The present is characterized by immense political, economic, and public pressures and expectations from all directions. The future is what climate science is all about (and what alone will judge the validity of its models). The present situation of climate change studies is thus characterized by a constellation in which science, society, and politics are intimately interlinked. The workshop proposes to study this unique constellation and trace its history.

We will first look at the past. Climatologists not only do historical and paleohistorical climatology, but they also frequently study the history of their own field, for example, in digging out data obtained by colleagues in the last two centuries. Historians of science can be helpful here. Yet historians, who by the standards of their own field must resist the temptation to interpret the past in the light of present research interests, are in an ambivalent position, as they situate climate change studies in historical contexts quite different from contemporary ones. The workshop will clarify the beginnings and history of climate change studies, trace the changing rationales behind these kinds of studies (ranging from voluntary climate change to preserving current climate), and also look at what kinds of historical and historiographical work climatologists actually do.

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A second section addresses climate change studies as they are currently done in laboratories and the field, and moreover looks at current research opportunities and constraints in a highly politically charged field. Climate change studies are pursued under high public scrutiny and pressure from a broad spectrum of interest groups, which can affect not only the organization of current research but also daily laboratory practice and the presentation of results. In the current situation, this field cannot be regarded--as some may wish--as merely disengaged science, simply tracing the history of the ever-changing climate of the earth. Rather, political engagement of both scientists and the public characterize climate change studies which might explain the strong focus on proving or denying global warming and on the modelling of the treatment of pollution problems.

The third section takes into account that climate science looks at the future by way of modelling atmospheric conditions. However, the predictions derived from various and differing models draw their wider relevance from economic scenarios. Economic scenarios, with their value-ladenness and attendant political implications, play a decisive role in the ultimate justification and financing of climate change studies. How did modelling shape up over the last decades in the fields of climate science and economics, and how did research in one field influence the other?

Studies of climate change indicate a changing relation between science and society, and between theory and action at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The workshop aims to obtain a critical distance from the current situation and hopes to clarify the questions about where we are now and how we got here.

Matthias Dörries
Christophe Masutti
Institut de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur les Sciences et la
Technologie (IRIST) Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg