Chapter 1
The Development of
Climate Research
by Antonio Navarra
11 n'y a plus, avec le systeme
statistique - de signification prolonde des lois - de sens pur.
P. Valery, Cahiers
1.1 The Nature of Climate Studies
The geophysical sciences in general and climate research in particular have
always played a special role among the other scientific disciplines for their
special relationship with the object of their study. Climate research deals
with climate, that is to say the response of the atmosphere, ocean, land and
ice systems to the solar forcing over a prescribed time interval. In this respect climatology diverges from the other quantitative "hard" sciences in a
simple, but very important detail: the impossibility of performing the "crucial" experiment on which the classic paradigmofinvestigation ofthe physical
sciences is built.
Since GaIileian times, scientific investigation has been based on the interplay between theory and experiment. The job of the theorist is to speculate
mathematical relationship between observable quantities to explain the physical phenomena on the basis of some hypothesis. Competing theories, that is