ABSTRACT
The introduction articulates the book’s key premises, and introduces the central claims. The first premise is that anthropogenic global warming represents an existential threat, an undermining of the conditions of possibility for countless life forms by which the planet is inhabited; the second is that, with sufficiently radical reductions of emissions of greenhouse gases, there might yet be some chance to prevent the worst-case scenario. Sketching these premises, the introduction also responds to two critiques such “radical” framings of climate change often provoke: alarmism and cynicism. The book’s premises clarified, the introduction moves to define its two main claims. The first is that, in revealing what is called (politically) “realistic” as precisely “unreal,” the climate crisis perforce locates us where our fundamental structures and representations of knowledge are enmeshed with a not-knowing that threatens to dissolve both the knowledge and the knowers such systems produce, an existential threat one name for which is trauma. Those systems, however, work powerfully to disarticulate that threat, normalizing a pervasive denial, beyond the explicitly designated “denialists”—a second claim: our dominant ways of figuring knowledge about global warming discursively disarticulate our knowing from the not-knowing by which they nonetheless remain inhabited and haunted.
