Rise of interdisciplinary research on climate

Abstract

Until the middle of the 20th century, the discipline of climatology was a stagnant field preoccupied with regional statistics. It had little to do with meteorology, which itself was predominantly a craft that paid scant attention to physical theory. The Second World War and Cold War promoted a rapid growth of meteorology, which some practitioners increasingly combined with physical science in hopes of understanding global climate dynamics. However, the dozen or so scientific disciplines that had something to say about climate were largely isolated from one another. In the 1960s and 1970s, worries about climate change helped to push the diverse fields into contact. Scientists interested in climate change kept their identification with different disciplines but developed ways to communicate across the boundaries (for example, in large international projects). Around the turn of the 21st century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change institutionalized an unprecedented process of exchanges; its reports relied especially on computer modeling, which became a center of fully integrated interdisciplinary cooperation.

Scholarly motivations to conduct interdisciplinary climate change research

“…While the value of such knowledge is clear (Nissani 1997;Schmidt and Moyer 2008;Weart 2013), the production of it rests on the decisions of scientists to pursue interdisciplinary research. A growing body of research on "problem choice" (Carayol and Dalle 2007;Merton 1957;Ziman 1987;Zuckerman 1978) seeks to explain factors influencing a scholar's choice of research questions, though this area of study has placed less emphasis on explaining the choice to pursue interdisciplinary research (but see, e.g., Carayol and Thi 2005;Debackere and Rappa 1994).…”

“…We focus on climate change both because it is representative of the complex interconnected challenges humanity faces today and because there are growing opportunities for scholars to engage in interdisciplinary climate change research (Brown et al 2010;Kinzig 2001;Mitchell and Weiler 2011). Collaboration among scientists from a variety of disciplines in the study of climate change can be traced back to the 1980s, including the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (Mooney et al 2013;Weart 2013), while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment process has been credited with institutionalizing interdisciplinary exchanges in climate research since the turn of the twentyfirst century (Weart 2013). Interdisciplinary knowledge on climate change is needed because climate change is characterized by scientific and economic complexity and is fraught with deep uncertainty (Burkett et al 2014).…”

Climate science and slow violence: A view from political geography and STS on mobilizing technoscientific ontologies of climate change

“…In addition to Weart (2008Weart ( , 2013, Hulme (2009) and Edwards (2010) noted previously, other scholars have examined the selective construction of Western climate change science (Shackley & Wynne, 1996, 1997, Shackley, Young, Parkinson, & Wynne, 1998Demeritt, 2001;Jasanoff, 2004Jasanoff, , 2010Oreskes & Conway, 2010). Elements of this work have demonstrated the false binary embedded in the notion that value-neutral climate science informs value-laden policy (Jasanoff & Wynne, 1998).…”

Visite dans les rouages du climat

“…Une autre façon de définir un climat est de se référer à la biosphère qui s'y développe spontanément : la végétation, qui a longtemps servi à définir les climats, mais aussi toute la faune qui y prospère. En parallèle, les sciences physiques ont permis de décrypter le fonctionnement de la machine climatique, puis de la modéliser [1]. Cette machine fait interagir de nombreux processus au sein des enveloppes extérieures de la Terre.…”