For an empire of ‘all types of climate': meteorology as an imperial science

This article explores the relationship between meteorology, British imperialism and evolving forms of scientific internationalism in the twentieth century. Focussing on a series of imperial meteorology conferences begun in 1919, it is shown how the British Empire was positioned in the interwar period as a corrective to skewed forms of scientific internationalism which were emerging in meteorology, with standards and data formats biased towards Northern climates. Possessed of an empire of ‘all types of climate’, British meteorologists identified themselves as a counterbalance to a perceived eurocentrism in international meteorology. The Empire was thus a convenient shortcut to a truly ‘global’ science, while meteorology itself emerged as a potentially powerful new resource as aviation and agricultural developmentalism took hold. The paper contributes to debates about the spatialities of scientific practice, offering the imperial as an interstitial space where a new globalism might be reconciled with the Empire’s diversity of climates and meteorological techniques. It argues that empire was an important way in which meteorology became global – both in its subject matter and in its practices

The 'genie of the storm': cyclonic reasoning and the spaces of weather observation in the southern Indian Ocean, 1851-1925

This article engages with debates about the status and geographies of colonial science by arguing for the significance of meteorological knowledge-making in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Mauritius. The article focuses on how tropical storms were imagined, theorised and anticipated by an isolated - but by no means peripheral - cast of meteorologists who positioned Mauritius as an important centre of calculation in an expanding infrastructure of maritime meteorology. Charles Meldrum in particular earned renown in the mid-nineteenth century for theoretical insights into cyclone behaviour and for achieving an unprecedented spatial reach in synoptic meteorology. But as the influx of weather data dried up towards the end of the century, attention turned to new practices of 'single-station forecasting', by which cyclones might be foreseen and predicted, not through extended observational networks, but by careful study of the behaviour of one set of instruments in one place. These practices created new moral economies of risk and responsibility, as well as 'a poetry', as one meteorologist described it, in the instrumental, sensory and imaginative engagement with a violent atmospheric environment. Colonial Indian Ocean 'cyclonology' offers an opportunity to reflect on how the physical, economic and cultural geographies of an island colony combined to produce spaces of weather observation defined by both connection and disconnection, the latter to be overcome not only by infrastructure, but by the imagination

The predictive state: science, territory and the future of the Indian climate

Acts of scientific calculation have long been considered central to the formation of the modern nation-state, yet the transnational spaces of knowledge generation and political action associated with climate change seem to challenge territorial modes of political order. This paper explores the changing geographies of climate prediction through a study of the ways in which climate change is rendered knowable at the national scale in India. The recent controversy surrounding an erroneous prediction of melting Himalayan glaciers by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a window onto the complex and at times antagonistic relationship between the Panel and Indian political and scientific communities. The Indian reaction to the error, made public in 2009, drew upon a national history of contestation around climate change science, and corresponded with the establishment of a scientific assessment network (INCCA) which has given the state a new platform on which to bring together knowledge about the future climate. I argue that INCCA is indicative of the growing use of regional climate models within longer traditions of national territorial knowledge-making, allowing a re-scaling of climate change according to local norms and practices of linking scientific knowledge to political action. I illustrate the complex co-production of the epistemic and the normative in climate politics, but also seek to show how co-productionist understandings of science and politics can function as strategic resources in the ongoing negotiation of social order. In this case, scientific rationalities and modes of environmental governance contribute to the contested epistemic construction of territory and the evolving spatiality of the modern nation-state under a changing climate

The IPCC and the new map of science and politics

In this study, we review work which seeks to understand and interpret the place of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) within the science and politics of climate change in the context of a post‐Paris polycentric governance regime and the culture of “post‐truth” politics. Focusing on studies of how the IPCC has sought to maintain a boundary between the scientific and the political, we offer an historical account of “boundary work” within the IPCC which is instructive for thinking, in an anticipative mode, about emerging and likely challenges to the IPCC's position as a science–policy boundary organization. We suggest that the relationships between climate science and policy are undergoing fundamental transformation in light of the Paris Agreement, and contend that the IPCC will need to be nimble and reflexive in meeting new challenges. Growing calls for more “solution‐oriented” assessment question the IPCC's positioning at the science—politics boundary, where it can function to put some policy options on the table, while obscuring others. Recent controversies over proposed mitigation solutions are indicative of likely future challenges. We suggest that by adopting a mode of “responsible assessment,” the IPCC can continue to exercise its world‐making power in a relevant and legitimate fashion

The politics of anticipation:the IPCC and the negative emissions technologies experience

Non-technical summary: In the post-Paris political landscape, the relationship between science and politics is changing. We discuss what this means for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs) as a window into the fraught politics of producing policy-relevant pathways and scenarios. We suggest that pathways and scenarios have a ‘world-making’ power, potentially shaping the world in their own image and creating new political realities. Assessment bodies like the IPCC need to reflect on this power, and the implications of changing political contexts, in new ways. Technical summary: Following the adoption of the Paris Agreement of December 2015, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has begun to reconsider its role in the climate regime. Based on work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), we reconstruct how the IPCC has historically positioned itself between climate science and policy-making. We then discuss particular challenges raised if the IPCC is shifting along the spectrum from attributing causes and detecting impacts of global warming towards projecting policy solutions, including emerging technologies, by examining recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs). We conclude that the IPCC exercises a ‘world-making’ power by providing new, politically powerful visions of actionable futures, for example, based on speculative technologies of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). The task of providing future pathways poses great challenges to conventional ideals of scientific neutrality. We argue that the growing political demand for pathways, and their political significance, requires rethinking modes of assessment that go beyond expert-driven neutral input. Assessment processes must take into account their political contexts and implications in a systematic way

Introduction—Up, down, round and round: Verticalities in the history of science

History of science's spatial turn has focused on the horizontal dimension, leaving the role of the vertical mostly unexplored as both a condition and object of scientific knowledge production. This special issue seeks to contribute to a burgeoning discussion on the role of verticality in modern sciences, building upon a wider interdisciplinary debate about the importance of the vertical and the volumetric in the making of modern lifeworlds. In this essay and in the contributions that follow, verticality appears as a condition of knowledge production—a set of movements and mobilities, technical challenges, political negotiations, and bodily hardships—and an object of scientific inquiry, requiring new techniques of mapping and visualisation and generative of new insights into physical processes and temporal change. By foregrounding the vertical, historians of science can gain new insights and tell new stories about how science is done in the field, the observatory, and the laboratory, and about how those sciences have helped build a modern, three‐dimensional world

Geographies of science and technology II: In the critical zone

Amidst an unfolding environmental crisis, suspicion about the totalising and homogenising spatial grammars of the ‘Anthropocene’ has spurred the development of a new spatial concept which, its proponents hope, can better ground the science and politics of environmental change in local geographies. In this second report on science and technology, I use this concept as a lens onto recent work in geography concerned with the space-times of ‘environmental’ sciences and technologies, broadly construed. The notion of the ‘critical zone’, and the practice of ‘critical zone science’, directs our attention to geographical work on situated practices of interdisciplinarity, on new modes of producing and working with ‘big data’, and on the volumetric, vertical and subterranean spaces of technoscientific practice. Emerging research has also engaged with the technologisation of critical zone management, while new insights into ‘lively capital’ and nonhuman labour push us to see the critical zone not just as an increasingly technologised space, but as itself a technology of human autopoiesis. Amidst the febrile politics of sustaining this planetary living-system, new questions are being asked about what it means to be critical in the critical zone