post-normal climate science: special issue

We are glad to announce a special issue of  "Nature and Culture" on "post-normal climate science", edited by Werner Krauss, Mike S. Schäfer and Hans von Storch. It is follow-up to our last year's workshop on "post-normal science: the case of climate research", which was discussed for example here and now gets a wonderful update by Jerry Ravetz, who puts the workshop into the context of the history of post-normal science.  During this summer, we will present his and all the other articles here on klimazwiebel for discussion. 

Judith Curry already presented Silke Beck's article from this special issue,  'Between tribalism and trust: The IPCC under the "public microscope",' here on Climate etc. This is an excellent piece of social science, which aims to reconstruct a debate in order to show how it came into being and to make it understandable. This is not about truth or not truth, right or wrong: this is about the social dynamics of a public and highly contested debate.

Read here the abstract (main parts of the text and a link to the manuscript you find on the Judith Curry link)


Abstract:
This article explores how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has dealt with growing public scrutiny of its workings. It reviews recent initiatives set up to respond to the Climategate controversy. An independent review of the IPCC undertaken by an international scientific umbrella body—InterAcademy Council—can be shown to have triggered one of the turning points in the debate, placing the focus of attention on the IPCC's transparency and accountability. However, the council's recommendations have been implemented by the IPCC in such a way that the issue of public trust is treated as one of effective communication. The article then explains how IPCC's responses to Climategate can be traced back to the linear model of expertise. The article concludes with a discussion why the challenge of producing policy-relevant knowledge under conditions of heightened public scrutiny also requires new forms of scientific appraisal aimed at wider publics.  

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