Part I: On Urgent Action, History and the Climate as Scientific Fact
On Responses to Climate Change: International Organisations and Urgent Calls to Action
In public discourse, attitudes to climate change in many of the international organisations are characterised by calls to urgent action. The President Designate of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) urges that if ‘we’ want to “meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C”, we need to take “urgent action now” (Sharma, 2021). The President of the United States of America (USA) speaks of “a narrow moment to pursue action at home and abroad in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of that crisis” (Biden, 2021), as do European Union (EU) experts who equally push for “urgent action to curb climate change” (European Commission, 2010).
What we can observe in these examples of institutions of international governance is thus a unanimous desire to actively address climate change. The UNFCCC, the USA and the EU put emphasis on their emotional experience of climate change and push to act with urgency. They, in other words, describe the vigour by which they seek to address climate change in one way or another.
COP25 Closing Plenary in 2019.
Image by UNclimatechange via flickr
What I am interested in investigating here is the historical and political origin of this urgency. More specifically, I would like to understand the institutional and organisational knowledge practises around climate change, and how they contribute to its prevalent and popular conception as a crisis. Crucially, it seems these scientific knowledge-making practices create sometimes very implicit and rather deterministic forecasts of our social futures. That is to say, as a foundation for climate change intervention models, our primarily numbered understanding of climate change informs socially unreflected but urgently realised interventions in social life. In doing so, we seem to run the risk of history repeating itself; particularly, by finding new economic forms of exploitation from old practices of political oppression. If, as anthropologist Moore postulates, “the recognition of anthropogenic planetary change calls for the refashioning of human and nonhuman life on earth, then extreme care must go into redesigning […] viable earthly relations on multiple levels” (Moore referencing Latour, 2015: 40). In this regard, social scientists are in a prime position to not only critically review socio-scientific knowledge claims regarding climate change.They are particularly well-placed to enact context-conscious care, and deliberately suggest socially considerate alternatives in corresponding policy interventions addressing climate change.
On the Experience of Climate Change as a Crisis: Two Contributing Factors
I would like to begin by retracing that which contributes to the collective understanding of climate change as a situation of emergency. This is not to question the claim to crisis per se, but to identify its historical and discursive origins.
Climate change, and the category of climate as such, is much more than a scientific measure or a factually warming planet. Its emergence as a scientific category, and planetary condition is riddled with undertones of political control and colonial oppression from the 18th century onwards. In fact, that which has caused our climate to change dates back to the era of ‘modernisation’, colonisation and industrialisation (Malm and Hornborg in Moore, 2015: 39). The transition to fossil fuels as the main energy resource of human activity is likely one of the most remarkable developments in this respect. But even if it contributed to much of what we call progress today, it also caused much suffering at the time. I find it critical to mention that our ‘modern’ advancements were based on imperialist ambitions, generated by the resources and labour off the back of many colonised peoples (Malm and Hornborg, 2014: 64). Our human history with fossil fuels thus raises questions of responsibility in the face of climate change (Malm, 2016: 219): if today’s climate change is largely a product of the West’s modernisation and colonisation impositions of the past, who carries the costs for climate change and its impact on billions of peoples’ livelihood especially across the Global South? Without attempting a response here, such history begs the question of responsibility. Quite literally, who caused climate change to occur in the first place, and who is meant to prevent and mitigate the crisis in its unfolding? The history of climate change brings old political baggage to the table – such that there is much left to be deliberated and negotiated here.
Underground Coal Miners in Bachra, India
Image by Biswarup Ganguly via commons.wikimedia.org
Coal Mine in Jharkhand
Image by TripodStories- AB via commons.wikimedia.org
What adds to the megalomaniac features implicit in climate change as imperialist endeavour are our ways of speaking, or what Amelia Moore called the ‘global saga of anthropogenic decline’ as substantiated by the ‘teleologies of the earth sciences’ (2015: 39). James Lovelock, the founding father of the concept of Gaia, the earth system sciences or ‘the idea of a self-regulating earth’ (Lovelock in Naked Science, 2007), for instance, anticipates for climate change to return us to ‘our Stone Age existence […] one where few of us survive among the wreckage of our once biodiverse earth’ (Hulme, 2011: 249). Such a dramatic forecast of an apocalyptic future culminates in the experience of the present as one of ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’. Interestingly, these metaphors were introduced by scientists in their communication of research results, particularly due to a concern for governmental inaction (Castree, 2020: 7). That is to say, scientists have alluded to metaphors of urgency and crisis to alert societies’ decision-makers to the gravity of climate change and its impact on the globe. Our ways of speaking – ‘geostories’ according to Latour (in Moore, 2015: 39) – create an emotive overhead which ultimately dramatises what climate change means to the world.
Climate science: IPCC report launch and exclusive briefings by The Climate Group
Image by TheClimateGroup via creativecommons.org
On Climate Change as Anticipated Crisis of Scientific Fact
For the sake of this argument, namely the apparent institutional perception of climate change in international organisations mostly ‘located’ in the Western hemisphere, I am focusing on climate change as an anticipated crisis of scientific fact (see Knox, 2015: 92). The difference is significant, because in effect, climate change is not a crisis of disaster in the moment, but a crisis long substantiated and anticipated by science. In fact, the dominance of numbers and statistics in our understanding of climate change as an emergency is noteworthy; it gives institutions, businesses and societies’ decision-makers the authority to take action. Think of the planetary increase in temperature, for instance. Since the 1880s, the planet has warmed by 0.08 degrees Celsius (National Centers for Information, 2020). ‘Temperature’ carries political authority because of epistemological developments in the second half of the 20th century. The production of ‘climate’ as a distinct and measurable analytical category was the result of United States-promoted research in disciplines such as glaciology, meteorology and atmospheric sciences, during the Cold War (Allan, 2017: 144 – 145). The aim was to become more versatile and to expand ‘operational control over the weather and the forces of land, sea and air’ (Allan, 2017: 145). ‘The climate’ as a scientific category was, in other words, not simply a unit of scientific investigation but a means to govern (idem).
‘Climate science and decision making tools such as SERVIR provide data on climate indicators such as storms, precipitation, floods, and temperatures’
Image by USAID_IMAGES via creativecommons.org
Looking at governments’ and international organisations’ climate goals today (see, for instance: ILO, 2021), it is precisely and mainly by measure of CO2 – another scientific unit of analysis that predominantly defines our understanding of climate change (Hulme, 2011: 265) – that the international community is governed by today. International governance is thus almost intrinsically wedded with the knowledge-making practices advanced in the 20th century. More so, it is by means of science that international organisations have come to acknowledge climate change as a crisis in the first place. Instead of an uncontrollable disaster to break into our lives, we have a numerically calculated one to reckon with. In fact, intervention designs are mostly informed by these very same statistics and climate modelling activities (Hulme, 2011: 258).We thus have a particular kind of crisis; one which is the product of industrial progress and political injustice from the past, yet also one that is carried into the future by the statistics and forecast activities of the earth and climate sciences (Hulme, 2011: 245). Climate change is a crisis that has been brought to the fore in the 20th century, by politically driven knowledge-making practices of the largely wartorn political West.
The impact of these political and scientific knowledge practices is vast, in other words. Especially in the context of urgency, as propagated by many of the international institutions mentioned in the introduction, their application deserves scrutiny. For the reason that climate change and climate science represent politics announcing the coming of an unprecedented anthropogenic crisis, the ‘realness’ of the numeric prediction is as real as reality itself. In fact, it appears that it is for this ‘realness’ of climate change that leads public figures to call for urgent action now.
Anthropology, Climate Change and Sustainability 