Scientific Communication and its History – III
Climate and Weather: Science as Public Culture
Conference at the Maison Française d’Oxford
7 – 9 January 2013
Call for Papers
This is the third conference in a series devoted to historical and contemporary perspectives on the communication of science and technology.
Climate and weather provide a particularly rich and challenging case study to complete the conference series. The climate sciences are characterized by complexity: in their professional networks; their conceptual models; and the logistics of their large-scale data and computing needs. Yet few modern scientific disciplines attract the same level of public engagement, in both everyday life and passionate debate on the future of the planet. Moreover, their status at the intersection of policy, scientific controversy and the public sphere is not a recent development: the same issues and fault lines ran through meteorology from the 18th-century onwards.