What could history of science contribute in solving present scientific problems? Is that a matter of academic interest only, or is there any relevance for the present mainstream research? Is history of science limited to the amelioration of intellectual environment which could clarify historical and intellectual evolution of the specific problem? Science is still suspicious about its history because, according to the ideological principles of the Enlightenment, history is very close to the conceptions of the past and the obscure. Most scientists hold on history as something that is left behind and believe that evolutionary overview of scientific ideas, seen as accumulation of scientific successes, is the only valid approach to the science in general.

But Thomas Kuhn in his famous work Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1964) warned us that, in science, revolutions exist along the evolutions and that they have strong impact on the science and its development. Moreover, Kuhn points out that new theories prevail not because they are more truthful than old ones, but simply because proponents of old theories died out. In favor of his approach we may add the insight of Claude Levy Strauss who notices that every new generation of technology is made for one purpose only – to resolve the problems that were made by the previous one (Strauss, 1958).

In that perspective, it is not hard to conclude that the first aim of history of science in the anthropological key could be to calm down evolutionary optimism. The excellent example for the relevance of such a task is present scientific consideration of climate changes, specifically of hypothetic global warming. The main statement of today’s climatology is that climate changes nowadays are induced predominately by industrial pollution based on global impact of industrial greenhouse gases. It is considered that CO2 is the prime mover of ongoing climate dynamics and primal cause for melting of many glaciers.

Other than that, there exists an astronomical theory of climate change where climate dynamics are seen as a result of orbital forcing and impact of three Milankovic’s cycles which govern climate more or less independently from terrestrial influences. While astronomical impact over climate is demonstrated in stratigraphic records in various proxies all around the world, industrial forcing is based on computer models and different extrapolations.

In the frame of the mentioned first task of history of science it should be emphasized that many aspects of the current debate on climate changes and global warming are not unprecedented but have a history of their own. The questions whether climate is changing by extraterrestrial forces, and whether man is influencing climate are not only, or at least not primarily, of pure scientific nature, but they have significant historical background. From the point of view of history of science, this ambiguity clearly reflects controversy among geocentric and heliocentric standpoint. The idea of geocentric causality is that ground for all terrestrial events should not be found outside the Earth. This idea has its theological as well as technological or scientific form.

At the beginning of the scientific search for the causes of climate changes, at the end of 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the Earth sciences rejected astronomical explanations of climate dynamics, given by Adhemar, Croll and others, that slow shifts in secular variations of the Earth’s orbit enforce climate change. Instead of that, Earth sciences offered a plethora of geocentric theories. Elevation of land masses - mountain building (Lyell 1830–33, Wright 1890, Ramsay1909–10, 1924, Brooks 1926, 1949), changes in atmospheric circulation (Harmer, 1901, 1925, Gregory 1908, Hobbs 1926, Flint and Dorsey 1945), changes in oceanic circulation (Hull 1897, Chamberlin 1899, Brooks 1925, Lasareff 1929), changes in continent-ocean distribution (Czerney 1881, Harmer 1901, 1925, Gregory 1908, Brooks 1926, Willis 1932), changes in atmospheric composition (Arrhenius 1896, Chamberlin 1897, 1899, Ekholm 1901, Callendar 1938, 1939) and volcanic dust in the atmosphere (Humphreys 1913, 1920, Abbot and Fowle 1913). There are of course “extraterrestrial” theories as well, for instance collision with cosmic dust (Hoyle and Lyttleton 1939, Himpel 1947)) and variations in Sun’s output (Czerny 1881, Huntington 1915, Huntington and Visher 1922), but they are more or less speculative because they could be neither disputed nor proved.

The last among mentioned geocentric theories, the idea of volcanic eruption as the trigger of climate changes, clearly represents methodological weakness of the geocentric approach. This seemingly plausible assumption could not explain regularity in stratigraphic records around the planet, because volcanic eruptions are more or less of random nature. Therefore it is not surprising that this idea lost its cogency in front of excellent congruity of celestial mechanics and geological records, in the mathematical frame of the astronomical theory of climate. Despite that, in the last decade of the 20th century, geocentric approach was revived through the idea of industrial dust, industrial pollution and CO2 as the prime movers of climate dynamics.

Beginning in 1938, the role of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in climate change was mentioned by G. S. Callendar, a British steam engineer. He pointed out that, at that time, humanity had been intervening heavily in the slow-moving carbon cycle by “throwing some 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the air each minute”. This argument could be quite persuasive if we don’t take into account that, for instance, eruptions of volcano St. Helens in USA in 1981 threw maybe more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in one day than the world's cars had done in 100 years (McGee, et al., 1994). Significance of such events was proved also by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which covered the Earth with a cloud of sulfuric acid and other sulfates and caused a drop in the planet’s average temperature of about 0.5°C for roughly two years (Hensen et al., 1992; Soden et al., 2002).

Therefore, second task of history of science should be to analyze fallacies that were made in previous generations of scientific theories and respective technologies. Such an approach instructs us to understand that climatic impact of industry, as a modern sprite of volcano power, is probably not as strong as impact of those eruptions. From the standpoint of history of sciences, volcanic dust in the new generation of climatic theories is only replaced by industrial dust which evoke new apology of geocentric world view.

Contrary to those theories, obtaining an integral scientific view means not agonizing over cosmic, volcanic or industrial dust and scenarios built on them. But that would be an impossible task if we don’t take history of science quite seriously and see it as a superb archive not only of scientific successes, but of metamorphosis of various shortcomings and confounds. That leads us to the third and the most important task of the history of science - to recognize old blunders in the new mould.Air Max 95 20th Anniversary