| Popis: |
This chapter provides a short historical account of major developments and shifts in twentieth-century climate research. It explores a pattern of changes in the study of climate: from a geographical to a physical science; from an empirically focused study to a theory-based one; from the collection of measurements and descriptions to a search for causes and explanations; and from a bottom-up, local-scale practice to an increasingly top-down, global-scale science. The chapter pays particular attention to the roles of temporal and spatial scales, namely to the globalization of climate knowledge. A globalization of climate science and knowledge shifted attention away from local and regional human–climate interactions and the role of climate in human affairs to the investigation of purely physical processes, represented in differential equations. |
