Historical, Philosophical, and Sociological Perspectives on Earth System Modeling

Abstract

With the advent of climate change as a major challenge of our time, Earth system modeling has become highly policy-relevant regulatory science. In this situation, the social mechanisms that play a role in any scientific endeavor become particularly exposed. By discussing historical, philosophical, and sociological (HPS) aspects of the field's current "cultures of prediction" together with the physical science community in a physical science journal, we aim to provide an entry point into HPS reasoning for climate scientists interested in reflecting on their field and science in general. This paper, first, introduces our perspective on "science as culture" and climate modeling as "regulatory science" and, second, highlights and connects relevant ideas from the three commentaries that follow it. In so doing, we hope to give a fuller picture of climate science, the interplay it engenders between HPS and the physical sciences, the distinctions that it gives rise to as compared to some of the more traditional, exact, sciences in which it is rooted and its place in society including its role in scientific policy advice. 1. Why Do Historical, Philosophical, and Sociological Perspectives Matter for Climate Scientists? Some 360 years ago, Thomas Hobbes, natural philosopher and author of the political treatise Leviathan, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and inventor of the air pump, engaged in controversial debates over Boyle's air-pump experiments. In their seminal study of the controversy, historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer explore how acceptable methods of knowledge production were negotiated and how material technologies (the air-pump itself), literary technologies (the experimental report), and social technologies (Gentlemen witnesses) were mobilized to establish the cultural authority of scientific experimentalism. Shapin and Schaffer (1985) conclude the following: "As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know." (p. 344). In discussing the role of social factors in the production of knowledge, Shapin and Schaffer (1985) place particular relevance on what they call "technologies of trust" (p. 60). The (virtual) witnessing of a public assured that things had been done in the way claimed and served to "secure the assent of skeptics and bind communities together" (Hilgartner, 2000, p. 11). In much the same way, what historian of science Paul Edwards has called the "climate knowledge infrastructure" (Edwards, 2010, p. 19) has worked as a "technology of trust" in successfully establishing anthropogenic climate change as a scientific fact. At its heart is the "vast machine" (Edwards, 2010) of climate modeling as material technology. The models' ability to integrate the practical cosmos in ways that endeavor to remain faithful to known natural laws-and in so doing approximately reconstruct many features of the observed climate-makes climate ...

Another world is possible? – Climate movements’ bounded politicization between science and politics

“…Not at last, it concerns the authority to speak about climate futures and the agency to make visions become relevant (Leipold and Winkel, 2017;Beckert and Suckert, 2021). As climate change came to public understanding through scientific and quantified ways of representing futures, in particular through the utilization of modeling techniques (Aykut et al, 2019;Braunreiter et al, 2021), scholars highlighted the "cultural authority" of climate science over climate futures (Rödder et al, 2020). The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shape public, medial and political understandings of possible and plausible climate futures, communicating the risks of future catastrophic effects (Eriksson and Reischl, 2019;Guenther et al, 2024).…”