ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |29 pages

1 Anticipating Nature

The Productive Uncertainty of Climate Models

chapter |12 pages

3 Certain Figures

Modelling Nature among Environmental Experts in Coastal Tamil Nadu

chapter |20 pages

4 Enacting Cyclones

The Mixed Response to Climate Change in the Cook Islands

chapter |23 pages

5 Anticipation on Thin Ice

Diagrammatic Reasoning in the High Arctic

chapter |28 pages

6 Deciding the Future in the Land of Snow

Tibet as an Arena for Conflicting Forms of Knowledge and Policy

chapter |16 pages

7 Scaling Climate

The Politics of Anticipation

chapter |19 pages

8 Emancipating Nature

What the Flood Apprentice Learned from a Modelling Tutorial

chapter |20 pages

9 Modelling Ice

A Field Diary of Anticipation on the Greenland Ice Sheet

chapter |20 pages

10 Predictability in Question

On Climate Modelling in Physics

chapter |22 pages

11 Constructing Evidence and Trust

How Did Climate Scientists' confidence in Their Models and Simulations Emerge?

chapter |5 pages

12 Afterword

Reopening the Book of Nature(s)