Earth System Science, the IPCC and the problem of downward causation in human geographies of Global Climate Change

Nielsen, Jonas Østergaard; Sejersen, Frank

doi:10.1080/00167223.2012.741885

Cited by 15 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 59 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This narrative of the ‘Endangered Other’ manifests itself in widely used concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience (Hall & Sanders ). Taken together, these concepts disseminate images of Arctic communities as passive victims of climate change (Hastrup ), which coincides with a recent proliferation of environmentally deterministic arguments in the social sciences (Nielsen & Sejersen ).…”

Section: Temporal Dissociationsmentioning

confidence: 69%

Weathering climate: telescoping change

Simonetti

2019

Royal Anthropological Inst

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As the scientific distinction between climate and weather suggests, knowledge about climate is supposed to be beyond indigenous peoples’ everyday experience of the environment in that it requires a long‐term record. On the basis of ethnographic work among geoscientists in Scotland and West Greenland, I show that practitioners of this discipline have mastered the craft of turning ‘visible’ what is ‘invisible’ to the senses by playing with shorter time‐scales. In thinking and communicating about the past, geoscientists would compress and accelerate long‐term environmental processes, often at the cost of dissociating them from processes occurring at shorter time‐scales, particularly the adaptation of living organisms. Attending to the historical circumstances around the development of this skill, I argue that it relates to an ideal of objectivity in science that corresponds to an optical understanding of time, inspired by the image of the telescope. Challenging the distinction between climate and weather, and the epistemic distance on which it rests, I discuss recent approaches in environmental anthropology that have uncritically adopted this distinction to distinguish indigenous knowledge of the environment from climate science. In conclusion, informed by research with indigenous peoples of the Arctic, I speculate on alternative ways of understanding climate knowledge, beyond the climate‐weather distinction.

show abstract

Section: Temporal Dissociationsmentioning

confidence: 69%

Weathering climate: telescoping change

Simonetti

2019

Royal Anthropological Inst

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We note that the spatial and temporal scales of our analysis differ from most contemporary analyses of climate change, which focus on national and planetary scales and on immense temporal scales (Nielsen and Sejersen 2012;O'Brien and Barnett 2013). These large spatial and temporal scales appear in much literature conceptualizing the significance of time for social life.…”

Section: The Many Times Involved In Responding To Climate Changementioning

confidence: 92%

“…Palabras clave: adaptaci on, cambio clim atico, costas, pol ıtica, ascenso del nivel del mar, temporalidades, tiempo. C limate change is expected to alter ways of life in places, and planning for these futures is a troubling prospect for scientists adept at conceptualizing sociospatial processes in the present (Hulme 2010;Swyngedouw 2010;Nielsen and Sejersen 2012). The prospect of changed environments in the future challenges researchers to provide theories of the relationship between the present and the future that can inform adaptation decisions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporalities in Adaptation to Sea-Level Rise

Fincher

Barnett

Graham

2015

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Local residents, businesspeople, and policymakers engaged in climate change adaptation often think differently of the time available for action. Their understandings of time, and their practices that invoke time, form the complex and sometimes conflicting temporalities of adaptation to environmental change. They link the conditions of the past to those of the present and the future in a variety of ways, and their contemporary practices rest on such linking explicitly or implicitly. Yet the temporal connections between the present and distant future of places are undertheorized and poorly considered in the science and policy of adaptation to environmental change. In this article we address this theoretical and practical challenge by weaving together arguments from social and environmental geography with evidence from small coastal communities in southeastern Australia. We show that the past conditions residents' imagined futures and that these local, imagined futures are incongruent with scientific, popular, and policy accounts of the future. Thus we argue that the temporalities of adaptation include incommensurate and unacknowledged ways of knowing and that these affect adaptation practices. We propose that strategies devised by governments for adapting to environmental change need to make visible-and calibrate policies with-the diverse temporalities of adaptation. On this basis, the times between the present and the long-term future can be better navigated as a series of short and negotiated policy steps.

show abstract

“…The notion of ‘resilience’ in particular has recently prompted lively debate across and beyond geographic fields (Cote and Nightingale, 2012; Brown, 2013; Welsh, 2013; Simon and Randalls, 2016), while others have critically examined the epistemic construction of adaptation through linear, reductionist conceptions of climate–society relationships (e.g. Hulme, 2011; Beck, 2011; Nielsen and Sejersen, 2012).…”

Section: Constitutive Spaces Of Climate Knowledge-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic geographies of climate change

Mahony

Hulme

2016

Progress in Human Geography

129

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Anthropogenic climate change has been presented as the archetypal global problem, identified by the slow work of assembling a global knowledge infrastructure, and demanding a concertedly global political response. But this 'global' knowledge has distinctive geographies, shaped by histories of exploration and colonialism, by diverse epistemic and material cultures of knowledge-making, and by the often messy processes of linking scientific knowledge to decision-making within different polities. We suggest that understanding of the knowledge politics of climate change may benefit from engagement with literature on the geographies of science. We review work from across the social sciences which resonates with geographers' interests in the spatialities of scientific knowledge, to build a picture of what we call the epistemic geographies of climate change. Moving from the field site and the computer model to the conference room and international political negotiations, we examine the spatialities of the interactional co-production of knowledge and social order. In so doing, we aim to proffer a new approach to the intersections of space, knowledge and power which can enrich geography's engagements with the politics of a changing climate.

show abstract

Earth System Science, the IPCC and the problem of downward causation in human geographies of Global Climate Change

Cited by 15 publications

References 59 publications

Weathering climate: telescoping change

Weathering climate: telescoping change

Temporalities in Adaptation to Sea-Level Rise

Epistemic geographies of climate change

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About