Nadia Maïzi - Mines Paris – PSL - Climate prospective : scenarios from science and arts

Prospective is an attitude towards the future that stems from a reflection on human action in an accelerating world. To grasp this distant future, and following Gaston Berger, we should "…move beyond the overly narrow concept of positivist forecasting, which merely extended the future. Tomorrow will not be like yesterday. It will be new, and it will depend on us". To that end, in order explore that future, climate prospective which relies on the analysis of long-term scenarios is an appropriate approach. We will review how these visions of the future might be enriched, linking art, science, expertise, and to what extent they can rely on believes and fears. To that end we will review the variety of existing approaches for the creation of these scenarios :

• which tell a story (often one we believe in a priori) and back it up with descriptions and visions : this is what is known as storytelling based on expert opinion ;
• which do back casting, i.e. once you have set the objective you are trying to achieve, you go back in time by simulating and consolidating the trajectory that would enable you to achieve this goal, with intermediate stages ;
• which combine the imagination of science fiction writers with scientists expertises, as for instance in the case of the scenarios produced by the RED TEAM for the French Ministry of Defense in association with PSL University (Paris Sciences et Lettres).
• which relies on models, developed to provide the closest possible match with the ’real world’ and convey its complexity.