In this special issue, we focus on the particular impacts of neoliberalism as a regime of scientific management. Drawing on a wide range of studies from other fields, as well as the four cases in this issue, we argue that while there are important differences in how neoliberalism has been implemented across nations and disciplines, there are a set of key principles and common outcomes that can serve a heuristic function for STS scholars attempting a more careful examination of neoliberalism. These common outcomes include: the rollback of public funding for universities; the separation of research and teaching missions, leading to rising numbers of temporary faculty; the dissolution of the scientific author; the narrowing of research agendas to focus on the needs of commercial actors; an increasing reliance on market take-up to adjudicate intellectual disputes; and the intense fortification of intellectual property in an attempt to commercialize knowledge, impeding the production and dissemination of science. Taken together, these shifts suggest that the impact of neoliberal science policy and management extends far beyond the patent system into the methods, organization, and content of science. We thus urge STS scholars to undertake a detailed exploration of exactly how the external political—economic forces of neoliberalism are transforming technoscience.

``Global warming is now a weapon of mass destruction. It kills more people than terrorism, yet Blair and Bush do nothing.'' Houghton (2003)`N ow the invasion is upon us, surely we can delay no longer. We need to go at the task [of climate change] as though we are mobilising for war. In an unnecessarily great hurry.'' Leggett (2007) Imagining the worst The apocalypse looms ever nearer. Irreversible climate change, the threat of global terrorism, conflicts and wars over declining natural resources, the mobile avian flu carried by migratory birds, all resound to the fears prevalent in political and popular discourse in the 21st century (at least in the`developed world'). Whichever threat is conceived most pressing, there is a shortage of time in which to act, an immensity of tasks to accomplish, and the absolute necessity of taking precautionary action to prevent the very worst. The threats are both ultimately manageable with the relevant action, but also feared to be inherently unstable and potentially catastrophic, requiring precaution and investments in risk modelling. Managing the global future is legitimated under conditions of`extreme uncertainty' with these`total threats' that are, for Swyngedouw (2007), vague, ambiguous, but homogeneous. The presumed apocalyptic potential of contemporary threats thus underpins the call for precautionary, or preemptive, political action. The`precautionary principle' has become a central element of environmental politics, where it is increasingly accepted that regulatory action must be taken even if scientific evidence concerning the imminence and precise nature of threats remains disputed (Majone, 2002, page 90; Sunstein, 2003, pages 1005^1008). This principle, put simply, holds that``uncertainty is no excuse for inaction against serious or irreversible risks, [and] that absence of evidence

Policymakers, scientists, and social scientists have debated a wide array of responses to the realities and prospects of anthropogenic climate change. The focus of this review is on the 2 • C temperature target, described as the maximum allowable warming to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate. The temperature target has its roots in the ways in which scientists and economists developed heuristics from the 1970s to guide understanding and policy decision making about climate change. It draws from integrated assessment modeling, the 'traffic light' system of managing climate risks and a policy response guided as much by considerations of tolerability of different degrees of climate change as by simply reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The European Union (EU) proposed 2 • C as the policy target in 1996, with support from some environmentalists and scientists. It was subsequently listed as the desirable temperature target in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord. Yet the figure has a range of critics from scientific experts to economists arguing that the target is infeasible, expensive, and an inappropriate way of framing climate policy. Tracing the historical development of the target helps understand the context it emerged from and its various strengths and weaknesses.

Applications of 'resilience' have stretched it to the point of breaking, yet it still maintains a remarkable capacity to organize relations in diverse fields of geographical concern such as ecological management, development, security, psychology and urban preparedness. Critical takes on resilience have emphasized its neo-liberal roots and utility. Whilst we do not disagree with this stance, our critical intervention argues that there are multiple resiliences invoking differing spatialities, temporalities and political implications and that this multiplicity is an important part of the work that resilience can do. We explore diverse mobilizations of resilience thinking across a wide array of empirical domains drawing out the differing ontological bases of resiliences and the interventions meant to promote them, particularly given the tension between a desire for open, non-linearity on the one hand and a mission to control and manage on the other. Rather than take resilience to be a determinedly new shift in policymaking, we explore how the post-political qualities of 'resilience multiple' can enable changes in behaviours and practices that slide between conflicting and contestable visions of the good life and desirable futures. We argue that the only way to critically interrogate resilience is to force the question of particulars in its diverse articulations, and, thus, geographers should engage in debating the ontological politics of resilience multiple.

While many scholars researching the commercialization of science focus on biomedicine, this paper explores the changing commercial frameworks for meteorology in the UK and the US. The organization of meteorology in both countries increasingly reflects a political-economic approach that treats science as an economic entity in which market-based criteria can be used to allocate scientific resources. The differences are equally significant in terms of the production and dissemination of meteorological forecasts and other data to public and private services. Alongside this commercialization has been the emergence of weather derivatives markets -financial products that enable trading on weather indices in a way similar to oil or gas futures -which have re-shaped how some businesses interact with meteorologists. This paper explores how weather derivatives traders engage with, shape, and are frustrated by a commercialized approach to funding meteorological data and forecasts. It highlights how commercial imperatives raise questions about the collection and quality of meteorological data, and how forecasting and weather modelling is being adopted within the private sector to enable trading strategies in the weather derivatives market. The consequences for commercial actors are highly variable, suggesting that any account of commercialization of science, while recognizing extant policy shifts, must be sufficiently nuanced in its interpretation of such effects.On 23 May 2006, representatives of the UK Meteorological Office, which is funded by both the Ministry of Defence and its own commercial activities, were brought before the regular meeting of a UK parliamentary committee to account for how they had lost at least £1.5 million of public money in a failed business venture. The business, weatherXchange, had been established in 2001 as a joint venture with a financial broker (Umbrella Social Studies of Science 40(5) 705-730