Hacking the WITCH: Predictive Climate Modeling for the Social Sciences
Hacking the WITCH: Predictive Climate Modeling for the Social Sciences
Submitter: Samara Hayley Steele, University of California at Davis, shsteele@ucdavis.edu
Abstract:
As eco-social relations are increasingly mediated by predictive climate models, how might we better engage and critique them as part of our research? How might we likewise better bring them into the classroom? There are six models of Earth that have been approved by the C-MIP, and each of these models play a role in generating the predictive climate data used by the IPCC and world leaders to make decisions that affect us all. In this session, we're going to be spending some time with perhaps the most user-friendly of those six models: the WITCH. Created by the European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE), the WITCH is framed as a "global dynamic model integrating the interactions between the economy, the technological options, and climate change." In this session, we are going to use MAGICC, an online user interface created by the EIEE, to coax the WITCH into running some simulations, while also exploring what it would take to write our own simulations or even hack the model itself. We'll also discuss social assemblages that underpin the model, as well as avenues for involvement for social scientists in the creation of future models and other predictive technologies.
Areas of STS Scholarship: Environmental/Multispecies Studies, Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation, Information, Computing and Media Technology
Authors/Participants: Samara Hayley Steele, University of California at Davis
