The Social Life of Climate Change Models: Anticipating Nature (Routledge Studies in Anthropology)

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. Cover 1 The Social Life of Climate Change Models 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 List of Figures 8 Preface and Acknowledgements 10 1 Anticipating Nature: The Productive Uncertainty of Climate Models 12 2 How Climate Models Gain and Exercise Authority 41 3 Certain Figures: Modelling Nature among Environmental Experts in Coastal Tamil Nadu 56 4 Enacting Cyclones: The Mixed Response to Climate Change in the Cook Islands 68 5 Anticipation on Thin Ice: Diagrammatic Reasoning in the High Arctic 88 6 Deciding the Future in the Land of Snow: Tibet as an Arena for Conflicting Forms of Knowledge and Policy 111 7 Scaling Climate: The Politics of Anticipation 139 8 Emancipating Nature: What the Flood Apprentice Learned from a Modelling Tutorial 155 9 Modelling Ice: A Field Diary of Anticipation on the Greenland Ice Sheet 174 10 Predictability in Question: On Climate Modelling in Physics 194 11 Constructing Evidence and Trust: How Did Climate Scientists' Confidence in Their Models and Simulations Emerge? 214 12 Afterword: Reopening the Book of Nature(s) 236 Contributors 241 Index 244