Ave Scientia, morituri te salutant.
Uncertainties in the context of climate change are not only discussed from the purely scientific perspective anymore but also influence journalism, politics and the public. In the face of constantly new challenges and changing roles and tasks of scientists, journalists and politicians, a mutual understanding of respective perspectives of involved actors and of their resulting responses to uncertainty becomes more and more important.
In our course ‘Uncertain 2 Degree’ we, students and lecturers, aim to jointly understand the different causes and the development of uncertainties, to experience multiperspectivity and to examine the response and communication processes of different actors involved in the climate context. ‘Uncertain 2 Degrees’ seeks to build an integrated approach to ‘uncertainty’ in the context of climate change, through critical discussions and role-playing on the question ‘What role do uncertainties play in the debate about the ‘2-degree limit’?’. Beyond the format of a lecture series presenting individual perspectives, we use role-playing as a verbal and binding experience-element, which enables the synthesis of individual perspectives to improve a mutual understanding and to explore handling options.
‘Uncertain 2 Degrees’ is a weekly course within the international Master programme ‘Integrated Climate System Sciences’ (ICSS) and was newly developed for the summer term 2018. It is the subsequent interdisciplinary teaching project of ‘Scales in the Climate System’, which was a mandatory class for all ICSS students from 2015 to 2017. We, seven lecturers from mathematics, communication science, biological and physical oceanography, sociology, geography and soil sciences, teach the course as a team and most of us will be present in every lecture. The course is based on inquiry-based learning and teaching, thus we did not prior defined what will be the outcomes of this course but will develop results and ideas together with you, students. The class is living from the experiences we gained during three years of team-teaching ‘Scales in the Climate System’ but is an experiment for all of us. Don’t be scared, we will explicitly state what you need to do and know at the end (Learning outcomes and Rules and Procedures 2018, 2019 and 2020). However, this course is explicitly meant to be more challenging and different from everything we all experienced before. We hope that all of us will enjoy this adventure for the next few months.