Strange weather, again: Climate science as political art

For a long time before the ‘climategate ’ emails scandal of late 2009 which cast doubt on the propriety of science underpinning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), attention to climate change science and policy has focused solely upon the truth or falsity of the proposition that human behaviour is responsible for serious global risks from anthropogenic climate change. This article places such propositional concerns in the perspec-tive of a different understanding of the relationships between scientific knowledge and public policy issues from the conventional ‘translation’ model, in which prior scientific research and understanding is communicated and translated into corresponding policies – or not, if it remains disputed and overly uncertain. Explaining some of the key contingencies and bases for uncertainty in IPCC climate projections and human influences, I show how social and technical analysis of climate science is not about denial of the scien-tific propositional claims at issue, but about understanding the conditiona