Dissertation Research: Culture, Science, and Uncertainty: Conflicting Positions on Climate Change

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This ethnographic dissertation research will advance understanding of how climate change is constructed and discussed as a problem. It will yield insight into the competing scientific approaches, claims and social behaviors influencing the scientific and social debates, and help to provide a framework to help policy-makers interpret differing scientific positions. The research will analyze the extrascientific dimensions of the scientific debate about human-caused climate change. Its aim is to place differences in expert positions regarding the likelihood and severity of this change into their social, cultural, and political contexts. The central question is: in what ways do scientific theories and discussions on climate change reflect differences in predispositions related to cultural, social, and professional backgrounds, affiliations, values, and belief-systems. The focus is on climate modelers and their models; research subjects include modelers and scientists in related fields in the geosciences involved in the debate. Research methods include standard interview and archival research, and participant observation. The dissertation will analyze scientific theories and judgments for their divergent assumptions and approaches to scientific uncertainty. Competing positions on climate change and climate modeling will be compared and placed into social perspective through inquiry into scientists' professional backgrounds; their characterizations of the current debate on climate change, its development, and the issues it involves; and the ways in which they explain their own positions on climate change and their scientific approach to studying it in contrast with competing positions and approaches.