Matthias Heymann, Janet Martin-Nielsen, Gabriel Henderson, and Dania Achermann, Shaping Cultures of Prediction: Knowledge, Authority, and the Construction of Climate Change

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Sponsored by the Danish Research Council (2013-2016), this project examines the emergence of climate modelling as a culture of prediction (ca. 1960 to 1985). Climate modelling has played a major role in forging a scientific consensus about climatic change. Scientific consensus, however, tends to hide the social relations, complex negotiations and tangible interests behind the consensus itself. It straightens the diversity of scientific perceptions and the complexities of historical processes that have shaped it.

​This project aims at analyzing the scientific conflicts, social processes and underlying presumptions that contributed to (1) the emergence of climate modelling as a predominant research strategy, and (2) the controversial application of these models as predictive tools in science and policy. It will show how climate modelling and its uses emerged from a competition between different knowledge claims and epistemic standards and attained what some argue to be a hegemonic status within a diversity of knowledge cultures.