1 Rooted in society Werner Krauss Manuscript, please don’t quote. Final version published in: Nature geoscience, August 2010, Vol 3, NO8, pp 513-514 Science successfully established the discussion of climate change in the global arena. Following the Copenhagen crisis in climate policy, attention needs to be shifted from global goals to societally relevant, local and pragmatic countermeasures. Climate science has been a success story. The development from identifying anthropogenic climate change to establishing it as a matter of global concern has culminated, so far, in the award of the Nobel Peace Prize by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, together with Al Gore in 2007. But the recent Copenhagen climate summit – which many considered a failure – and a series of scandals surrounding climate science brought this success story to a halt. Initial success had not come without dispute. Before the award of the Nobel prize, reconstructions of global temperatures over the past millennium — publicized under the term hockey-stick graph — had been hotly debated in the public and political arenas. Then just before the Copenhagen conference, climate change science was portrayed as the foundation for any global agreement on climate change policy. The release of illegally hacked emails from the University of East Anglia plunged key climate scientists into the defensive once again, in the course of a media frenzy dubbed “climategate”. Following the first wave of excitement, errors were revealed in the 2007 report from the IPCC, most prominently on glacier melting in the Himalayas. As a consequence, the integrity of climate scientists and their assessment panels have been called into question. But there is more to this crisis than a lack of scientific scrutiny or political craftsmanship. I argue that last winter’s negative headlines mark the breakdown of an unfortunate association between climate science and climate policy that had allowed climate science to become politicized and climate politics to hide behind uncertainties in the science.