The Social Life of Climate Change Models

Anticipating Nature

Kirsten Hastrup, Martin Skrydstrup, Kirsten Hastrup, Martin Skrydstrup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415628587
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136203657
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on a combination of perspectives from diverse fields, this volume offers an anthropological study of climate change and the ways in which people attempt to predict its local implications, showing how the processes of knowledge making among lay people and experts are not only comparable but also deeply entangled. Through analysis of predictive practices in a diversity of regions affected by climate change – including coastal India, the Cook Islands, Tibet, and the High Arctic, and various domains of scientific expertise and policy making such as ice core drilling, flood risk modelling, and coastal adaptation – the book shows how all attempts at modelling nature's course are deeply social, and how current research in "climate" contributes to a rethinking of nature as a multiplicity of modalities that impact social life.

1 Anticipating Nature

The Productive Uncertainty of Climate Models

Kirsten Hastrup

The present volume addresses the profound question of how one can anticipate nature’s course, scientifically and practically; the question is answered from the points of view of several academic disciplines: anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, physics, and the history of science, brought together by a shared ambition to open up a new space for interdisciplinary discussion. This ambition is spurred by the intensified discussion of climate change and the need to rethink the entanglement of natural and social processes contained within the figure of “climate”. Possibly the most comprehensive token of this entanglement is found in the notion of the Anthropocene now replacing the Holocene as the name of the present geological era. The Holocene started after the latest glacial period and thus comprises the history of humanity since the invention of agriculture and the emergence of the earliest known complex, urban societies (Anderson et al. 2007). The technological and social advancement since then has now come to a point where it is no longer possible to understand the Earth as independent of human influence, hence the Anthropocene (Ehkers & Kraft 2006). After more than 10–12,000 years of agricultural development, on top of which we have seen some 200 years of intense industrialization, an exponential global population growth, and a massive urbanization, the human fingerprint, in the oceans, in the atmosphere. The Earth is so deeply marked by human activity that climate cannot be understood without acknowledging this. In that sense, we are at “nature”s end” (Sörlin & Warde 2009).

By implication, it is no longer possible to entertain a notion of a selfregenerating nature, beyond the human domain. Humans are all over the place, not only as destroyers of nature, of course, but also as providers of solutions. It is part of human and social life to take action. For social agents to act consistently and to take responsibility for their community, they need to have reasonably well-founded expectations to the future. In this volume we analyze the processes by which such expectations are established within diverse social and scientific communities. Through the case studies presented, the question of scale is linked to particular knowledge practices, and it is shown how the general human capacity for anticipation is shaped and stretched within such practices.and it is shown how the general human capacity for anticipation is shaped and stretched within such practices.

The practices by which people deal with the challenge of projected climate changes may be based on statistical models and computer simulations or on direct experiences of greater weather variability and intensified weather events; at both ends of the spectrum, they are dependent on records, experiences, and observations. The foundation of climate modelling is empirical across the board; some models use palaeo-climatic records, others rely on personal recollection and direct experience. Furthermore, all of the anticipated scenarios build upon a knowledge that is captured somewhere, for instance in ice cores, atmospheric compositions, geological traces, place names, memories, bodily sensations, stories, simulations, diagrams, or some other medium that may close the gap between past experience and future expectation by incorporating them into a comprehensive model. The elements of the model may then be processed and transformed into realistic climate scenarios. Although there is certainly a multiplicity of processing modalities, these may be seen as variations over the common theme of climate modelling.

Climate modelling takes place along diverse lines of reasoning and at different scales, as we shall see in some detail in the chapters below. In the process of modelling, nature is reconceptualized and the future reimagined. The volume focuses on the intricate links between the modelling, the configuration of nature, and the human anticipation. The ambition is to establish a common ground for further reasoning across disciplines and scales. This is pertinent, because on the one hand, climate change is fraught with ambiguities even as people agree upon its reality (Hulme 2009), whereas on the other there is an urgent need for mitigating actions. Speaking across disciplines, as we do in this volume, is not driven by a simple wish to mix knowledge, but by a sense of generic interdisciplinarity, as suggested by Marilyn Strathern, viz. a means to address problems seen to lie athwart specialisms (Strathern 2005: 127). This certainly applies to the problem of climate change.

Anthropologists have addressed local implications of climate change all over the world and contributed to the discussion of the perceived turning points between ordinary weather variability and permanent climate change (Strauss & Orlove 2003; Orlove et al. 2008; Crate & Nuttall 2009). For all the merits of local ethnography, anthropological studies of climate change of this kind have been sidelined as more or less irrelevant outside of the discipline itself (Strathern 2005). To talk across disciplinary boundaries, anthropologists need to cultivate a more comprehensive interest in the interpenetration of local and global climate issues and of different registers of knowledge. This would link up anthropology with recent developments in other social sciences such as sociology, political science, economics, and science and technology studies. In view of the fact that the climate uncertainties are multiplying around the globe, everybody has to negotiate the boundary between manageable risks on the one hand, and fears that are unknown both in origin and scope on the other (Bauman 2006, 2007; cf. Douglas 1985; Douglas & Wildavsky 1982; Beck 1992). This distinction between known or at least identifiable risk and unknown and maybe even unknowable sources of uncertainty and fear (partly owed to Bauman 2006: 100) is important for our concern with anticipation. Among the unknowns on the ground, so to speak, are the economic consequences of shifting environmental conditions and new energy scenarios (Stern 2006). Basic food security is at stake in some regions (Lobell & Burke 2010), and this again has severe implications for political stability and international security concerns (Vanderheiden 2008).

At the other end of the scientific spectrum, the natural sciences have produced a vast amount of knowledge of the current climate trends. There is no absolute consensus about the details or about the root causes of the development, but the larger trend is well established: the globe is warming (IPCC 2007; Richardson et al. 2011). Not least because of this remarkable agreement, large groups of people all over the world are worried; when the scientific projections feed into current experiences of extreme weather variability, risk may turn into fear. As Mike Hulme has suggested, climate might also be acknowledged as a resource for intellectual creativity, however (Hulme 2009). Either way, there is little doubt that the liquidity of the climate scenarios is itself a social driver; it infiltrates the perception not only of the environment, but also of social life and knowledge. The anticipated climate change seems to af ect our total “social imaginary”, comprising the social, political, and moral order (Taylor 2004). If nothing else, then because the social is now so manifestly entangled with the natural, and therefore increasingly difficult to control.

This is the basis for the question posed in this volume of how one can anticipate nature, practically and scientifically, so as to make the world work. Climate change belongs to the interface between natural and social histories and highlights the necessity of establishing a closer relation between diverse disciplines if we are to create a common ground upon which we can reimagine a shared world and rethink received notions of nature and culture.

Human agency is based as much upon future expectations as upon past experiences (Hastrup 2007). Expectations about natural developments are not outside of the human and social realm. To understand how weather variability is incorporated and projected into a horizon for the future, a diversity of perspectives is called upon to creatively explore the processes of reasoning by which people envisage the future, and which may link models of multiple scales to each other. This is the objective of the volume.

To open up a space for reflecting upon this objective I shall, first, present the general process of modelling in terms of some basic components. Second, I identify some modes of configuration, i.e. ways of capturing and disseminating the knowledge about climate change gained through the process of modelling. Third, I shall discuss some modalities of nature with a view to elucidating the destabilized ontology implied in the new knowledge. Fourth and finally, I shall return to the practices of anticipation as embedded within different modes of reasoning, and as presented in the individual chapters.

THE PROCESS OF MODELLING: FIVE COMPONENTS

Evidently, scholars belong to the same earthly world as other people, and although climate change may mean different things to different people, these have a lot in common at the level of reasoning itself. Talking across different meanings and vocabularies is a basic anthropological enterprise, serving also as a model for interdisciplinarity. Both “offer diversity as at once foundational to an enterprise and as innovative exploration” (Strathern 2006: 198). Before we can substantiate the merits of this claim, we must centre our attention on the process of climate modelling itself, by identifying some components that connect rather than separate the various disciplines and scales, and which make the conversation possible. These components are observation, formalization, experimentation, projection, and action. They shall be presented here in the attempt to itemize and generalize the process of modelling as such. As will transpire, the components are not totally separate. Rather, they are part of a comprehensive, iterative process of making an argument about something, which cannot be known, but must be intimated to allow for some kind of action.

Observation and experience are cornerstones in all learning processes. People from all walks of life know their surroundings from paying attention to them, from moving within them, and from talking about them. Among people in general, scientists stand out not by their being fundamentally different, but by their attention being more methodological and more systematically recorded. With respect to climate change, the attention may focus on holy mountains, ice cores, cyclones, or atmospheric turbulence, but wherever the observational or experiential material is produced the implicit point is an acknowledgement of the agency of matter (Latour 2005). From each their perspective, or on each their scale, the observers are implicitly singling out what matters, and how it matters in the larger climate change equation. One basic question is how things are made to matter within the model in focus, and by which computational or conceptual tools the case is made. In the process of dealing with this question, new tools are explored and hierarchies of understanding established. It is also shown how modelling is in fact part of everyday attempts at understanding and anticipating nature.

Formalization of climate change observations implies an establishment of rules and regularities implicit in the material. Such regularities may be established on the basis of diverse mechanisms, such as enumeration or mapping, leading to statistical correlations or (mental) diagrams. We should note here that rules in the social domain are regularities (not laws)—possibly also in the natural domain, even if the rhythm may be slower. To establish solid rules in both domains, now recognized as mutually implicated, one must identify convergences and confluences in the material at hand. In some parts of the material, events abound and may form long series of observations; in other parts, events are few and far between, and direct observation must be supplemented by proxy data, identified as such because of other observed regularities of relations. Event richness and event poverty may be equally important to note, when formal pictures of regularities are established and used as the baseline for experimentation.

Experimentation implies some kind of manipulation with forms, computationally, mentally, or experientially. Once a form has been established that depicts the regularities, experimentation allows for trying out the not-yet-realized, the possible; this takes place in a social realm, populated by other people, other scientists, other manipulators. One could say that experimentation allows the objects to “talk back”, or the matter to really matter—at least within the model. Experimentation is a means of testing some of the established regularities, and possibly to revise the rules. It allows for trying out when and where something matters more or less. different kinds of experimentation may be juxtaposed, revealing different qualities of the matter, in the manner known from e.g. the complementary perspectives on light as either particles or waves. In the process of experimentation, which is of course a social practice, the limits of one’s knowledge become conspicuous. Although it seems precluded to experiment with climate in real life, experimenting with models is possible, as is the experimentation by comparison in real-time experience. Walking on the sea-ice in the High Arctic and reading it for clues about thinning and cracking is in itself a practical experiment, akin to a peer-review of different scenarios.

Projection of probable futures is the principal outcome of such experimentation; in some cases the projections are expressions of probability, in others of well-established rules. Implicitly they are often seen as predictions, yet this is an entirely different matter (in principle), applicable only within a limited range of mechanical systems. As Edwin Ardener so convincingly argued, predictivity fails at the only moment at which it is truly important (1989: 53). Because prediction always rests on repetition, it will of course flounder when repetition does not occur. Although, clearly, social and environmental (so-called) systems may tend towards repetitive inertia for some time and along measurable parameters, and thus allow for a degree of probabilistic reasoning, it is diffcult to know when inertia is overturned, and repetition fails—and with it: prediction. This said, the strength of models is measured by their capacity to project probable futures on the basis of experimentation and simulation.

Action, finally, is a possible outcome of the projections, whether in terms of everyday or political action; but it is also a function of one’s understanding of the plot in which one takes part, including its temporal and spatial extension (Hastrup 2004a). Climate actions take multiple shapes; they may comprise a rerouting of well-established trails, a reshaping of local drainage systems, new measures of governance, mitigation or education, new demands for political action, or for new scientific knowledge. This again may lead to new observations or to the incorporation of new externalities into the models that may alter the projections. When projections are translated into actions, they will be subject to a negotiation of multiple interests, and to a highlighting of particular projections at the expense of others. The confluence of particular models in various centres of action and authority in itself may result in widely variegated actions and measures of mitigation.

With these five components in mind, it should once again be stressed that they are intimately linked. They constitute an iterative process of arguing about nature and social action that is never devoid of interest; politics and policy are at work throughout (Giddens 2009). The process of modelling itself implies a particular point of perception. Although at first sight this may be seen as detracting from the validity of models, this is in fact also part of its strength. The models may be trusted because the process of modelling is open to both new observations and to experimentation. This is where multiple forms of climate modelling emerge as a sound response to the converging uncertainties about the global environment, and as constructive ways of making past and present observations and experience relevant to the unknown future, to which there seems no direct access by way of the inertia of repetition.

In many ways, the main purpose of climate modelling is arguably to substitute for missing empirical data, mostly because the data are literally beyond reach in both time and space. In the process of substitution, selections are made as to what matters most. It is therefore worth stressing once again that climate modelling is socially embedded, as i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Anthropology
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Anticipating Nature: The Productive Uncertainty of Climate Models
• 2 How Climate Models Gain and Exercise Authority
• 3 Certain Figures: Modelling Nature among Environmental Experts in Coastal Tamil Nadu
• 4 Enacting Cyclones: The Mixed Response to Climate Change in the Cook Islands
• 5 Anticipation on Thin Ice: Diagrammatic Reasoning in the High Arctic
• 6 Deciding the Future in the Land of Snow: Tibet as an Arena for Conflicting Forms of Knowledge and Policy
• 7 Scaling Climate: The Politics of Anticipation
• 8 Emancipating Nature: What the Flood Apprentice Learned from a Modelling Tutorial
• 9 Modelling Ice: A Field Diary of Anticipation on the Greenland Ice Sheet
• 10 Predictability in Question: On Climate Modelling in Physics
• 11 Constructing Evidence and Trust: How Did Climate Scientists' Confidence in Their Models and Simulations Emerge?
• 12 Afterword: Reopening the Book of Nature(s)
• Contributors
• Index