ICYESS2013: Uncertainty as an example of interdisciplinary language problems

In final form 25 February 2014 ©2014 American Meteorological Society H ere we report on the first Interdisciplinary Conference of Young Earth System Scientists (ICYESS), which focused on understanding and interpreting uncertainty. Funded by a variety of German research organizations and hosted by the climate research cluster KlimaCampus of the University of Hamburg, ICYESS was organized and chaired by young Earth system scientists, partially from the graduate School of Integrated Climate System Sciences (SICSS) as well as the Young Earth System Scientists (YESS) community. The ICYESS followed upon a series of graduate conferences of the northern German excellence clusters for marine and climate research and extended the focus to more disciplines and an international audience. A big portion of the available travel money was spent to enable young scientists from Africa and Asia to join ICYESS, a move that enabled discussions on the North–South gap in climate science and politics from the inside and was highly beneficial toward the idea of a global community of young Earth system scientists. WHY DO WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT UNCERTAINTY? The motivation of the ICYESS was foremost to enable interdisciplinary capacity building in the diverse field of Earth system science and to improve the exchange between the variety of scientific disciplines that are part of it. The conference focus on uncertainties in Earth system sciences was chosen as a focal point to illustrate the problems that appear when historically and methodologically very distant sciences try to work together. There are a multitude of causes for uncertainties in different research fields and they are often multiplied in interdisciplinary research. Examples include: