Brief Communication: Climate science as a social process – history, climatic determinism, CUDOS und post-normality

Abstract. Since ages, the topic of climate – in the sense of “usual weather” – has in the western tradition attracted attention as a possible explanatory factor. Climate, and its purported impact on society, is an integrated element in western thinking and perception.

In this lecture, the history of ideas about the climatic impact on humans and society, and the emergence of the ideology of climatic determinism are sketched. This ideology favored the perception of westerners being superior to the people in the rest of the world, giving legitimacy to colonialism.

In modern time, when natural sciences instituted self-critical processes (repeatability, falsification) and norms (CUDOS @Merton), the traditional host for climate issues, namely geography, lost its grip, and physics took over. This led to a more systematic, critical, and rigorous approach of building and testing hypotheses and concepts. This gain in methodical rigor, however, went along with the loss of understanding that climate is hardly a key explanatory factor for societal differences and developments. Consequently, the large segments of the field tacitly and unknowingly began reviving the abandoned concept of climatic determinism. Climate science finds itself in a “post-normal” condition, which leads to a frequent dominance of political utility over methodical rigor.