In a cabinet in the Manchester Gallery of the Manchester Museum, an array of moths is on display. On the left of the cabinet is the light peppered moth (var. typica) and on the right the dark peppered moth (var. carbonaria), with variations of the specimens mounted in between (figure 4.1). Flanked by examples of premodern environmental pasts — from the bones of Der-byshire Bison to early twentieth- century collections of bog moss — the peppered moths have been included in the museum exhibition because of both their connection to Manchester and their place as some of the clear-est evidence of Darwinian natural selection, brought into view by human influence on the environment. During the nineteenth century, field natu-ralists in the city began to notice an increased preponderance of the dark peppered moth. Before 1811 the species had not even been named, but by the end of the nineteenth century, in industrial Manchester, the dark pep-pered moth had almost completely replaced the light- colored variety. In 1896 James William Tutt suggested that the increase in the dark moths was the result of natural selection. The precise mechanisms by which this dark-ening had occurred — which was to be termed “industrial melanism” —
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were outlined in the mid- twentieth century by Bernard Kettlewell (1955), who demonstrated that as soot from coal had blackened the trees in the city, the lighter- colored moths had ceased to be camouflaged and were now more easily seen by predatory birds; as a result, their darker cousins experienced an evolutionary advantage. While this has become an inter-nationally famous example of evolutionary mechanisms in action, in the exhibition at the Manchester Museum it also served as a symbol of the re-lationship between industry and environment in the city, mainly because of what happened next. In 1956 the Clean Air Act was passed in the United Kingdom, and coal- fired industry and domestic use of coal were radically reduced. As the trees regained their original color, the white moths re-turned. In this moment, industry and the citizens of Manchester became framed as both the triggers for a temporal interruption in normal evolu-tionary processes and also the cause of a more hopeful story of restoration.
As the museum curator put it when I spoke to her about the exhibition, the story of the moths helps us explain that “we can’t change the past, but we can change the future.” In 2016 this message became the centerpiece of Manchester Museum’s Climate Control exhibition, the moths taking center
FIgure 4.1 Biston betularia cabinet in the Manchester Museum. Source: Author.
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stage as a symbol of past environmental change and a hopeful message that a response to climate change might similarly be possible.
But for many visiting the exhibition, the story of the moths did not pro-duce the hopeful message that we can change the future. One visitor to the Climate Control exhibition captured this in a post on her blog in which she reflected, “It’s telling that in boxes showing visitors’ opinions at the end of the exhibition, the most full were ‘If I knew what to do, I would do more of it’ and ‘I don’t think my actions will make a difference.’ It is evident that a sense of powerlessness dominates public opinion.”1
In this chapter I explore why climate futures are not the same as past industrial futures that were resolvable through technical fixes capable of reversing bastardized trajectories of technosocial change. Focusing in par-ticular on a climate change adaptation project that was trying to predict and prepare for a changing climate, I look at how the temporal form of climate change is one where planetary futures are already ordained, writ-ten in the traces of carbon dioxide that previous generations have already released into the atmosphere and whose effects are yet to be seen owing to the interplay among oceans, plants, and the atmosphere. The form that climate futures take is further characterized by the unpredictability and danger of tipping points — catastrophic events such as the breakup of Ant-arctic ice sheets or the sudden release of methane gas from repositories underneath the arctic permafrost with the potential to trigger “runaway climate change.” Taming these unpredictabilities is complicated work, and translating this complexity into messages that resonate with already exist-ing practices of everyday life is deeply challengexist-ing. Museum visitors are not wrong when they say that they do not think their actions will make a difference, for while predictions of climate futures call for action, they also call for another kind of response — a preparedness for an uncertain future that human beings may not be able to change, at least not intention-ally. To demand a response to this future is to ask people to engage with something that is deeply material but whose material absence in the present often seems to contradict the very messages that climate models convey.
The approach I am taking to climate change in this book, which treats it as a form, idea, and set of significatory relationships, offers us a way to better understand the manner in which climate change exists in the present not as existing materialities, such as weather or floods, but as a form that ex-ists in the future. Understanding climate change as an idea or form that is constitutive of material relations, but also takes a shape that exceeds those
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relations, allows us to begin to understand how the future climate comes to act on the present, and to investigate where it fails to do so and why.
It is July 2011, a few weeks after the most recent meeting of the Manches-ter: A Certain Future steering group, and I am sitting in a garden on the edge of the city, reading, with the sun coming through the yellow- green leaves of the Robinia pseudoacacia “frisia” tree, casting a pattern of light and shadows on the pages of the book. People are at work, so the garden is unusually quiet. A gentle breeze is moving the leaves side to side. It is emi-nently pleasant and comfortable. It is forecast to be 23 degrees Celsius. On the bbc weather web page, the latest reading from Woodford, the nearest weather station, is 18 degrees at 9:00 a.m. It is 10:45 now, and the warmth is intensifying. As I read, I recall a meeting I attended the previous week with a manager of a property development firm and the discussion we had about climate crisis in the context of a mini – heat wave that Manchester had been experiencing. This heat wave was regarded as the state of things to come, a brief weather event that, hard as it may seem given how pleasant many found these blue- skied summer days, had apocalyptic overtones. How hard it is, he had reflected, to invoke a crisis when the conditions of crisis are manifested in comfort. The crisis of a temperate climate, where average summer temperatures will be 23 degrees Celsius (73.4 degrees Fahrenheit), seems like no crisis at all. Indeed, people I talked to about climate change in Manchester often commented that it would be rather nice for the weather in the city to be a few degrees warmer.
We live in a time, however, when statements about weather cannot be contained as neutral commentaries on natural meteorological events. If weather in other times and places has bespoken the power of supernatu-ral beings (Ellis 2003), the agency of witches (Oster 2004), or the myste-rious ways of an omniscient God (Roncoli, Ingram, and Kirshen 2002), now weather talk also hints at the possibility of an unsanctioned human interference in otherwise natural processes. At the same time as weather is directly experienced — as pleasurable warmth, a dangerous wind, an un-seasonable snowstorm — it also lingers as the possible answer to a ques-tion often more felt than spoken: Is this “just” weather, or is this a sign of a future yet to come, of which this particular warmth or cold is but a forewarning?2
If weather entails a political demand for preparedness, this demand has an ambiguous relationship to the materiality through which it comes to manifest. For unlike the moths, which indexed first the presence of indus-trial pollution and then a societal reparation of that transgressive,
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ing relationship with the environment, the politics of weather in times of climate change is not contained within the material configuration of any particular weather event that can be directly repaired. Rather, establish-ing weather as geopolitical requires castestablish-ing out- of- the- ordinary meteoro-logical happenings forward into projections of a potential world that may come to pass. Unlike the politics of actually existing pollution, the politics of weather, reimagined as anthropogenic climate change, is undeniably ma-terial, but it is sustained as politics only through an ongoing engagement with a realm that is usually thought of as inherently immaterial: that is, the future.
In this chapter I delve into the implications of the futurity of climate change for the possibilities available to people to prepare themselves for futures that are made with data about the past and the experiences of life in the present. I do so by attending first to the way in which climate models help to surface the future form of climate change. I then look at how these climate futures are deployed, often unsuccessfully, to encourage new forms of practice in the present, driven by engagement with the futures they de-scribe. While models convey scientifically robust projections of what look likely to be catastrophic futures, these projections frequently lose their charge when they are put into confrontation with the already existing wild-ness and untamability of the people, materials, and objects that are meant to be the sites where protections against risky futures are forged.
Modeling Climate Futures
In the previous three chapters, I explored the way in which methods for evidencing the interaction between carbon emissions and a changing cli-mate work to frame a problem of governmentality oriented toward the local management of global carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
Here we have seen how climate models tell a story of a morally inflected fu-ture that still has the chance of being altered, if not entirely avoided. How-ever, climate change brings with it not only the hope of reparation in this life with a view to changing the lives of future generations but also the ques-tion of what to do about futures that might be beyond the control of regu-latory or technical forms of climate engineering. Here the question is not,
“How will the collective conduct of the human species today manifest in the formation of a future world?” but, rather, “How can we sense the future so as to best prepare for its portended effects?”
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Although the problem is most commonly posed as “adaptation” rather than “mitigation,” climate modeling is still key to the way in which possi-ble responses are articulated. For example, Working Group II of the ipcc, which is dedicated to the question of how to understand the impacts, needs for adaptation, and potential vulnerabilities raised by global climate change, proceeds from the findings of Working Group I, whose job is to determine the scientific basis for acting. The ipcc report Climate Change 2014 — Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability outlines the potential effects of global climate change on different parts of the world based on the projec-tions of global climate models and indexes them according to their prob-ability (ipcc 2014a). Here generic future weather- induced events such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, and wildfires are brought into re-lation with social dynamics through their framing as climate risks. The ipcc tackles these risks by dividing the report into two kinds of tangible sites. The first deals with the risks of climate change for global transforma-tions and specific industry sectors. The second attempts to locate these risks within particular geographical locales.
While global climate models are deployed to make probabilistic claims about the effects that might be seen in particular regions of the world, it is less clear how they can answer the question of how this knowledge can be made useful to people right now, in particular places, so that they can begin to prepare for a changing climate. Shock is often expressed in public com-mentaries about the lack of evident preparation for climate change, particu-larly in areas that are projected to be most affected. Newspaper reports on climate change frequently point to low- lying regions like Florida to express surprise that politicians and property owners have not begun to invest in sea defenses and to protect the land from likely inundation. What causes this? Some kind of cognitive incapacity or inability for rational action? A politics of blindness? A death drive?3
Psychological arguments abound in attempts to understand the seem-ing mismatch between scientific models of the future and local responses to the data.4 However, casting the response to climate models in the same uni-versal light as the models themselves, blaming the human disposition and a generalized incapacity to process information properly, papers over the particular operations out of which specific responses to climate models are generated. Rather than seeing modeling as providing an ontological truth about climate, while those who are supposed to respond to the framing of climate by climate science are described as blinded by social or cultural interests, I suggest that a better way of exploring seeming
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ings in the construction of climate futures is to reframe our description of climate science so as to render it equivalent to other kinds of future- making practices. This is not a matter of deconstructing the truth of the scientific data or questioning the data’s veracity but is rather a matter of understand-ing both climate models and the processes in which they aim to intervene as figurations or ideas. The capacity for affinity or disunity between differ-ent ideas derives not from the reality of one versus the reality of the other but, as outlined in the introduction, from the formlike qualities that each possesses, which either enable or disavow the possibility of relations be-tween them. To use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) analogy of the wasp and the orchid, the figure of the wasp can be linked to the figure of the orchid not because of a discontinuity in their individual realities as two separate entities that in turn creates the conditions for an encounter, but because the possibility of communication emerges from the relation between their relative forms — the pollen- collecting shape of the wasp and the shape of the orchid’s petals — through which both are transformed:
The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp;
but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive appa-ratus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogenous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata — a parallelism between two strata such that a plant orga-nization on one imitates an animal orgaorga-nization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veri-table becoming, a becoming- wasp of the orchid and a becoming- orchid of the wasp. (11)
To be able to appreciate their mutuality, both the wasp and the orchid have to be treated analytically as equivalent and brought into the same frame of analysis so that the separation between them can be explained rather than assumed as the starting point for analysis. In Gregory Bateson’s terms, this is a matter of attending to the question of where “a difference which makes a difference” lies ([1972] 2000, 271 – 272). Difference here is not substantive but relational. This attention to how the difference between adaptation models and in situ responses to those models emerges relationally consti-tutes the core focus of this chapter.
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Looking ethnographically at both climate models and the sites where it is hoped that these models will have an effect enables us to observe what happens when the figure of the future climate transported in climate mod-els is pulled out from laboratories and into locations where it is hoped that it will bring about actions to manage future climate risks in the present.
Attending to the difference between climate futures and material manifes-tations of climatic considerations in the present points us toward an expla-nation for why climate models so often seem to become irrelevant when they come into contact with other practices, devices, techniques, and concerns.
Modeling the Future
In Manchester the question of how to draw climate projections into the planning of local futures was being explored by a project called EcoCities.
EcoCities was set up as a strategic partnership among a number of institu-tions in the city. It involved seven academic researchers at one of the city’s universities, a representative from the city council, and an engineering firm and was funded by the charitable arm of a local property development and management company. It also drew in experts from beyond the university, including a team of two people from a local communications agency. This group of researchers, marketers, council officers, and businesspeople were working together to attempt to devise a method for answering the decep-tively simple question, What will Manchester’s future climate be like, and what measures will we need to take to deal with the changes effectively?
Its tagline was “four degrees of preparation” — which pointed both to the number emerging from climate models that projected a likely 4 degrees of global warming by 2100 and to the multiple dimensions of intervention that would be needed.
The challenge that the project was addressing was how to describe and create projections based on the complex relationship among climate, weather, and place. The aim was to provide an account of the way in which predicted changes to the weather globally would impact people in Man-chester. These impacts were to be analyzed as to their possible occurrence at three different scales: the scale of the city, the scale of the neighborhood, and the scale of the building. Impacts were approached as being simulta-neously social and technical, and there was a concerted effort to use inter-disciplinary methods that would be able to explore the coconstitution of
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potential future problems as made through an interplay among natural, technological, and social factors. Through this method the project aimed to develop answers to the questions of what Manchester’s climate future
potential future problems as made through an interplay among natural, technological, and social factors. Through this method the project aimed to develop answers to the questions of what Manchester’s climate future