Paper short abstract:

In the 20th century the way climate has been researched shifted from a geographical, human-related approach to a physical and computer-based science. This paper will explore the role of the reconstruction of past climates within these changes.

Paper long abstract:

In the 20th century the way climate was researched underwent radical changes. From the 19th century on, climatology had been a field within geography, and climate was associated with specific places and related to human sensation. This traditional concept was then challenged by a new notion of climate. From the mid-20th century on, a new generation of climate scientists, typically trained in meteorology or physics, depicted climate as a physical-mathematical and global variable, and began to use computer models as a tool to investigate climate. Climate modelling has fundamentally changed the production of climate knowledge and influenced the perception and interest in climate.

In my contribution I will raise the question of how the role of past climates changed within these developments. Traditional climatologists (often trained in geography and meteorology) considered the reconstruction of past climates to be of crucial importance for the understanding of the climate system. However, from around the 1960s on, they felt confronted with an increasing marginalization of their historical work by the growing epistemic authority of the physics-based climate models. At the same time, past climates gained enormous importance in a different field that blossomed into a fundamental pillar of modern computer-based climate science: the ice core research carried out by glaciologists and physicist. Although also interested in the climate's past they worked with different questions, methods, data and scales. This paper will inquire the interdependence of these different approaches with the development of a modern climate science.