Since 1988, the Office for Interdisciplinary Earth Studies of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) has run a series of annual Global Change Institutes (GCIs) on a range of topics under the broad theme of global environmental change. Participants in each GCI have come from a wide range of disciplines, including those peripheral to the main topic, in order to stimulate discussion and to ensure a multidisciplinary perspective. All GCIs have been highly successful and have led to important and useful proceedings volumes.

The sixth annual Global Change Institute was held over July 18–30, 1993, in Snowmass, Colorado. The topic of the institute was the carbon cycle. As a unique feature, the GCI focused on the practical problems of projecting future concentration changes for given emissions, estimating emissions for prescribed concentration profiles, and assessing the uncertainties in these calculations. Much of the discussion still involved processes, but the viewpoint fostered was as much that of the user of carbon cycle model output as of the “pure” scientist. Over the past decade, there has been a trend toward applied or socially relevant science. With the concern over future climatic change resulting from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, and with the central role that CO2 plays in this problem, there is no area of science in which cognizance of the social and policy implications is more important than in carbon cycle research.