In cooperation with the Kreissparkasse Ahrweiler the Europäische Akademie GmbH organised the 17th lecture of the Kreissparkasse today dealing with current questions regarding climate research and climate politics.

Friederike Wütscher

The speaker Professor Dr. rer. nat. Dr. h.c. Hans von Storch, who was co-author of the 3rd international climate assessment report of the IPCC, discussed problems regarding the role of principal actors in the climate sector and the issue of sustainability of climate science.

Von Storch stated that policy and science represented different social processes that are subject to social dynamics and implicit cultural controls but have different tasks and rules. Politics is value-driven and aims to balance interests and world views, while science ideally tries to analyse actual situations in a way free of values and interests. In order to be successful in the long run, the two social practices required a sustainable division of labour. If this is not done, both groups of actors would lose their potential to ensure an acceptable balance or to provide valid bases of knowledge.

As far as climate policy and research are concerned, the norm of sustainability has been compromised – parts of climate research tries to achieve a normatively motivated environmental policy by means of appropriate scenarios, whereas the present climate politics pretends that social preferences would no longer be relevant on the basis of scientifically reasoned necessities.

Therefore, the fact that the latest climate negotiations have failed and that the confidence in climate research had eroded is not surprising, said von Storch. It was of utmost importance to restore the original division of labour of the actors, in particular “honest broker” of science.

The moderator of the subsequent discussion was Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Carl Friedrich Gethmann, Director of the Europäische Akademie GmbH.

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