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Like any science, the study of population has been guided by normal science, as defined within the discipline. As Thomas Kuhn (1962) famously postulated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, researchers follow normal science until a crisis level of unexplainable anomalies is reached—i.e. anomalies that push the limits of current paradigms. The paradigms guiding population science may, in fact, be increasingly outdated in their exclusion of environmental factors. Yet rather than debating ‘narrowmindedness’, we devote this brief essay to a consideration of the conditions required for demographers to make worthwhile contributions to current discussions of climate change. A valuable example of a recent paradigm shift within population studies is the trend toward studying biological and genetic determinants of population processes. More than 15 years ago, a vigorous debate took place over whether biological/genetic data could provide new opportunities for understanding population processes, whether the relevant theories and data existed, and what forms of training and amounts of funding would be required to support these new research approaches (e.g. Finch et al. 2001). Since then, considerable time and energy have been devoted to training population scientists in these new areas, and to pursuing the opportunities presented by this new line of research. Time will tell whether these efforts have an important impact. This case provides a useful parallel in answering the question regarding the involvement of population scientists in climate change research. To be sure, demographers have long danced around the more general issue of connections between population development and the environment. In 1998, PAA President Anne Pebley reviewed this tendency and put forward arguments to explain why demographers have avoided directly addressing environmental concerns. In the end,

Will climate change shift demography’s ‘normal science’?