Or maybe we could just move the thermometers away from the air-conditioning exhaust vents

Climate Feedback: IHDP: should 90% of climate change research be social science?

I'm in the hall that once housed the West German Parliament, a glass-covered fish tank of a building on the Rhine, which nowadays has become the Bonn World Conference Centre. For the next four days, the politicians' microphone-studded desks will be lined by experts in the field of 'human dimensions of global change' - given the impressively broad nickname 'human dimensions' among this crowd. About 1,200 participants are here to give 800 talks that make up the Open Meeting of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), a research arm of the UN.

One of today's opening keynotes was from Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research. After a daunting rundown of climate change threats, Schellnhuber - a physicist in a sea of human-dimensioners - urged social science to take the front seat on the problem. "Speaking as a natural scientist," he said, "I think 90% of research [on global change] will have to be done by the social scientists."