Climate as a Technology of the State: A Genealogy of Climate Change

Rough Working Draft for PSA Conference, 30 March – 1 April, 2015, Sheffield, UK

** DRAFT – Please do not cite **

Scott Hamilton London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

s.t.hamilton@lse.ac.uk ABSTRACT: Climate change is presently understood to be a transnational and urgent environmental problem enveloping the entire globe. However, prior to the 1970s, the Earth’s climate was conceptualized by states as a national and natural resource, located securely within each sovereign state’s borders. Thus, when, how, and why, did the notion of sovereign state’s national climates, transform into a single global object? This article answers this question by conducting a genealogical analysis of climate change, as seen through the eyes of the state. It argues that our contemporary and naturalised concept of a 'global climate' is in fact a governmentalised one: an object resulting from the recent state practice of defining and delimiting the climate into being through supercomputers and complex mathematical ‘general circulation models’ (GCMs) that ‘parameterize’ the climate as a calculative grid, and disseminate this object to states and citizens alike through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thus, today’s notion of global climate change, is in no way natural nor universal; it is instead a recent, computerised, and technological object at its metaphysical foundation. After providing an overview of Foucauldian genealogy and (global) governmentality, this article conducts a genealogical analysis on the state and climate change. It concludes that our present ‘global’ concept of climate change, as disseminated by the IPCC, distills a global, technological, and shared, concept of both climate and subjective conduct, to the globe: a truly global form of governmentality, expressed through the technology of climate.  

  1  

After a full consideration, I am convinced that one of the basic reasons for the

rise of a nation in modern times is its control over climatic conditions: that the

nation which has led the world, leads the world, and will lead the world, is that

nation which lives in a climate, indoor and outdoor, nearest to the ideal,

provided always that its numbers are large enough to resist invasion by its

rivals.

SF Markham (1942)1

Introduction

Anthropogenic climate change is undoubtedly a global phenomenon.2 There is now

unprecedented agreement amongst states that the ‘Warming of the climate system is

unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes [to the climate] are

unprecedented over decades to millennia.’3 This statement, delivered from the

authoritative ‘Summary for Policymakers’ (SPM) of the Synthesis Report of the UN’s

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),4 portends a looming environmental

catastrophe of unprecedented proportions for every state and citizen on planet Earth: a

human- or anthropogenically-induced warming of the globe’s average temperature,

caused by an increased concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the

atmosphere from humanity’s use and combustion of fossil fuels. ‘Human influence on the

climate system is clear’, the IPCC’s most recent SPM report concludes. ‘This is evident

from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative

forcing, observed warming, and [enhanced] understanding of the climate system.’5

Despite this enhanced understanding, since the climate exists above the state at the global

level, a tragedy of the global commons and flaw of modern ‘global governance’ occurs:

that ‘intergovernmental institutions, and the forms of collaboration in which they engage,

                                                                                                               1 S.F. Markham, Climate and the Energy of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), 24. 2 ‘Global’ is defined here as physical and epistemic phenomena ‘that can directly affect humankind as a whole, both as object and subject (or as target and actor), in a nearly equal and potentially lethal manner.’ Furio Cerutti, Global Challenges for Leviathan: A Political Philosophy of Nuclear Weapons and Global Warming (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2007), 2. 3 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ‘Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report: Summary for Policymakers’, 1. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

  2  

lags well behind the emergence of collective problems with trans-border, especially

global, dimensions.’6 Indeed, as a 2013 Pew Research Centre report indicates, ‘publics

around the world’ deem climate change as a greater threat than even ‘international

financial instability’, terrorist extremism, and nuclear war.7 Yet, whilst ‘the science of the

climate and the empirical evidence mount up, the policy responses have so far had little

or no impact on the build-up of [carbon] emissions.’8 To phrase it simply: states do not

debate nor lack the science justifying substantive political action to combat climate

change. Instead, they lack the political impetus and will to suffer the economic

ramifications of moving away from carbon-intensive economies.9

However problematic, this conception of climate change and its narratives of individual,

state, and international (in)action, conceals several underlying assumptions that remain

unexamined and naturalised within contemporary International Relations (IR) literature,

and public discourse writ large. Firstly, whilst ‘climate change’ itself remains a

contentious and debatable political, economic, scientific, and social issue, how is it that

such a ‘global’ type of threat is made epistemologically or ontologically viable, operable,

or thinkable? Has the climate always been ‘global’? Is the IPCC’s positing of a ‘single

globally integrative framework’ for international policymakers, which asserts a ‘global

knowledge’ or shared scientific epistemology regarding what the climate ‘is’, even

possible?10 Secondly, and preceding and underlying this first group of questions: what

exactly is this referent object of a ‘global climate’ that is now brought into being by

scientists and states in the IPCC? How is this object debated, discussed, determined, and

disseminated to state citizens across the Earth? Was ‘climate change’ always a global

phenomena or threat, caused by humankind’s emission of carbon into the atmosphere?

Or, is this actually a unique and complex fusion of notions of climate, international

politics, and humanity’s impact upon Nature?

                                                                                                               6 Thomas Weiss, Global Governance: Why? What? Whither? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 2. 7 ‘Climate Change and Financial Instability Seen as Top Global Threats’, Pew Research Centre, June 24 2013. 8 Dieter Helm, ‘Climate-change Policy: What has so Little been Achieved?’ The Economics and Politics of Climate Change, eds. Dieter Helm and Cameron Hepburn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9. 9 Helm, ‘Climate-change Policy’, 16. 10 Mike Hulme, ‘Problems with making and governing global kinds of knowledge’, Global Environmental Change 20 (2010): 563.

  3  

This article answers these questions by conducting an historical and genealogical analysis

into how ‘climate change’ has been used, conceptualised, and politicised, by states. It

must be stressed that this paper is in no way intended to depoliticise the ethical and

political implications and ramifications of climate change; nor is its aim to critique or

cast-doubt upon the accuracy, role, and importance, of climate science and the IPCC.

Instead, as a genealogy it is intended not to cast doubt upon the truths of history, but to

question how we arrived at our commonsense and naturalised history of present truths.

As such, its findings are threefold: Firstly, whilst it is the organic building-block of

‘carbon’ that is associated with climate change today, our modern ‘carbon wars’ and the

association of global climate and global average temperature with carbon dioxide

emissions, is indeed very recent.11 In actuality, since the geophysical study of climate

began in the 18th century, climate science and climate change has gravitated almost

entirely around a puzzle quite the opposite of the global diffusion of organic carbon as

the atom of life: the inorganic and frozen molecule of H2O, or ice. In other words, the

concept of climate change itself, as ironic as it might appear to us today, is made of ice.

Until the 1960s, the mystery of Earth’s ice ages concerned both states and scientists,

considering that these climatic cycles affected regional or sovereign climates, and were

thus believed to distil racial and cultural characteristics to distinct national populations.12

The onset of the next ice age, especially through a nuclear winter engendered by

thermonuclear war between states, was of great concern after World War II. However,

through the introduction of GCMs in the 1970s, carbon became studied alongside aerosol

pollutants as a potential driver of climate, thereby fostering a longstanding debate

between adherents of global warming and ‘global cooling’ as yielding the fate of future

states. What the scientific and political transition from ice and global cooling to today’s

computed ecosystems of carbon and global warming represents, is a new form of

globalised biopolitics: of governing the conduct and actions of peoples and states as a

mass-species, reifying present economic and biological emissions of carbon and life only

                                                                                                               11 Jeremy Leggett, Carbon Wars: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1999). 12 Robert Kunzig & Wallace Broekner, Fixing Climate: The Story of Climate Science – And How to Stop Global Warming (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2009).

  4  

by negating the imperial, colonial, and historical political and economic hierarchies of the

past.13

Secondly, whilst the climate has become naturalised today as being global in scope, this

is likewise a very recent development. Until the 1980s, the ‘climate’ was still considered

by states as a regional and local phenomenon, or as the sovereign property of each state,

to be manipulated within specific boundaries and parameters amenable to a state’s

political, economic, and social goals and ends. The national climate, in other words,

embodied the desired political characteristics of a state, and infused these characteristics

within its nation. For example, even the founding fathers of the USA, such as Thomas

Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, actively promoted and engaged in (what they

perceived) to be anthropogenic climate change: the destruction of the ‘uncivilized’

wilderness of North America by European expansion and industry, in order to warm the

‘savage’ American climate into a ‘civilized’ climate amenable to white European

colonization.14 Climate change, in other words, has always been interconnected with

discourses of political normalisation. Today, as will be explored below, nowhere is this

tendency towards political normalisation more prominent than in the IPCC and

policymaker’s creation and assertion of a ‘global average temperature’ towards which

citizens and states alike must consider and strive towards. Rather than a new and

objective scientific benchmark, this genealogical analysis reveals the very notion of a

‘global average temperature’ to embrace longstanding political trends to govern the

climate as a normalising technology; a device to instill ethos of conduct, government, or

‘managerialism on a planetary scale.’15

Finally, this article demonstrates that our modern object of a global climate is not a

natural, scientific, or obvious one. Instead, at an implicit and metaphysical level, it is a

computerised or technological form of rendering climate knowable through calculation

and objectification. In other words, our modern climate is, at its conceptual root, the                                                                                                                13 Dahan, ‘Putting the Earth System in a numerical box? The evolution from climate modeling toward global change’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 41 (2010), 286. 14 James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 15 Hulme, ‘Global Knowledge’, 561.

  5  

product not of Nature, but of a computer. Previous regional and sovereign understandings

of climate change have traditionally been constructed through myths, stories, and

literatures, from the perspective of individual or social subjects representing these

climates to themselves through art, thought, literature, statistics, or whatever. With these

former tools, the sharing of a coherent concept of global climate across state boundaries,

was epistemologically impossible due to the incommensurability of local political and

social constructions within communities and their borders. However, with changing

representations of Nature resulting from advances in Western computer technology, a

new type of climatic object could be manifested and shared amongst scientists and states,

peaking first in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s. After WWII and the need for

international networks of climatological data, a computerised, quantified, and

mathematical emergence of a global object took shape through an ‘infrastructural

globalism’ of massive supercomputers, or Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation

models (AOGCMs, or GCMS).16 These GCMs filter Nature into a representation of the

atmosphere as a ‘parameterised’ grid, within which each cell is amenable to calculation,

irrespective of its time, place, or space. As will be explored below, it is through GCMs,

and their parameterised grids of Nature and climate, that both an ontological and

epistemological ‘global climate’ is brought into being. Interconnecting and transcending

states in the global hub of the IPCC, this ‘unequivocal’ notion of climatic change makes

the ‘global’ an object of knowledge territorially, spatially, and epistemologically. To take

any stand on ‘climate change’ is first to ground one’s perspective on this implicitly

technological and metaphysical foundation.

Taking these three findings into account, this article concludes that the emergence of our

global climate through complex, integrated, and mathematical forms of rendering Nature

and Being knowable only through complex computer algorithms, manifests a truly global

foundation and medium of thought. Climate, disclosed as a calculative ‘view from

everywhere’ that is changing, global, and unpredictable in its effects, becomes thinkable

irrespective of place, space, nation, race, or even subjectivity—and only through

                                                                                                               16 Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010).

  6  

technology. Therefore, it is not through statist or transnational forms of global

governance,17 nor through the global epistemic community or network of climate

scientists operating solely within the IPCC, that global thought emerges and is present

within discourses around the planet.18 Instead, by tracing how climate change has

emerged as a shared global object through these state practices and technologies, which

are now increasingly standardised, naturalised, and globalised internationally through the

IPCC and state policies and public discourses drawn from it, the basic notion of climate

change itself, as a thinkable concept, bestows a form of conduct, or of subtle governance.

Not a global government per se, but a shared mentality; in other words, a global govern-

mentality.

This argument will now be developed as follows. Firstly, this article it will provide a

brief overview and definition of global governmentality, and the debate within IR

concerning the feasablity of ‘scaling-up’ Foucault’s concept of governmentality from

domestic micro-practices within the state, to the level of the global.19 It will then answer

the calls of many governmentality scholars to utilise genealogy as a tool for

governmentality analytics, by conducting a genealogy of climate change as it has been

used and politicised by the state. Tracing the state’s use of climate change as a filter for

its domestic and international politics, thereby reveals the unexpected moment of

emergence in which previously regional and sovereign climates suddenly became

‘global’: through an explosion of military aid, nuclear weapons research, and computer

technology and international cooperation, that crystallised in the IPCC. This international

organisation now determines how, and why, and what the global climate portends for

humanity writ large. And yet, it was was borne unexpectedly out of the Cold War,

advanced military technology, and new fears of ‘global’ thermonuclear annihilation.

                                                                                                               17 Thomas Hale, David Held, & Kevin Young, Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing When We Need it Most (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); Weiss, Global Governance. 18 Peter M. Haas, ‘Introduction: epistemic communities and international policy coordination’, International Organization 46, no. 1 (1992): 1-35; Maarten A. Hajer, Authoritative Governance: Policy-making in the Age of Mediatization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 19 Jan Selby, ‘Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance and the Limits of Foucauldian IR’, International Relations 21, no. 3 (2007): 334.

  7  

Global Thought, Governmentality and Genealogy

(Global?) Governmentality

It is easy for IR scholars to simply assert that ‘“Global refers to everything happening

worldwide’, and that an object such as climate change ‘results from an acceleration of the

same global chemical and biological processes that have protected life on Earth for

millions of years.’20 In expressions such as this, the ‘global’ is subtly framed and

assumed as an ageless, natural, or universalised ontological object or space. From

pandemics, to financial crises, to climate change, the global realm simply is where these

so-called ‘global’ things must occur. Since ‘Knowledge is the key to understanding the

decision-making process’ surrounding global referents such as climate change,21

naturally, international and global governance demands and assumes forms of ‘globalised

knowledge’ to be shared, cognized, and acted upon by states and citizens across the

globe. How could it be otherwise?

However, if knowledge is dependent upon, and grounded upon, human thought, is a

global form of knowledge or epistemology possible? To answer this in a manner that

avoids the top-down assumption or imposition of ‘global’ categories, it behooves us to

take into consideration the constitution of thought at its most basic level, from the

ground-up, using a nominalist analytic that Michel Foucault labeled ‘governmentality’.22

For Foucault, the constitution or boundaries of thought can never be assumed a priori;

thought is instead a fluid and ongoing interplay between truth and falsity, that

‘consequently constitutes human beings as social and juridical [and ethical] subjects . . .

and must be analyzed in every manner of speaking, doing, or behaving in which the

                                                                                                               20 Weiss, Global Governance, 28, 79. 21 Ian H. Rowlands, The Politics of Global Atmospheric Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995): 25. 22 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78 (New York: Picador Press, 2007); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the the College de France, 1978-79 (New York: Picador Press, 2008).

  8  

individual appears and acts as knowing subject’.23 To act using knowledge, or to engage

in ‘action’, is thus the intertwining of thought into knowledge. Acting, and the relation of

actions upon other actions, thereby allows a human subject to conduct themselves by

engaging with others in a shared world.

If action and conduct relate subjects to each other in a world, how or where does this

meeting occur? Where might it be concentrated for us to observe? For Foucault, actions

and conducts are made visible through practices: the ‘different systems of action insofar

as they are inhabited by thought.’24 A practice, in other words, is where a subject’s

unique constitution of thought and knowledge is manifested empirically, onto the surface

of the world as a detectable form of practicable conduct. A practice offers, therefore, a

glimpse into a subject’s underlying mentality that emerges in this conduct, if only

interpreted correctly. To govern, according to Foucault, is ‘to structure the possible field

of action of others’ – to shape and mold ‘conduct of conduct’ – to orient and steer the

constitution and boundaries of thought and knowledge. To govern a mentality as such, to

shape the boundaries of thought, is governmentality.25 It exercises power by ‘guiding the

possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome’ of this knowledge and

practice. Power, therefore, is not a thing; it is a pure relation between the knowledge of

one subject, competing and merging against another. It is the application, the governing,

and the transcribing of the action of one subject, upon the action of another; the conduct

of one, becoming the conduct of another, or an entirely new form of conduct guiding

both; the knowledge of one subject, swirling and flowing into the knowledge of another.

Hence, Foucault’s famous (and frequently misunderstood) dictum of power/knowledge:

power is the shaping of thought or subjectivity according to knowledge, whilst

knowledge, as thought, is the sole medium, conveyor, or ontology, of power. They are

                                                                                                               23 Michel Foucault, ‘Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume Two’ in Michel Foucault: Ethics. The Essential Worlds of Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: The New Press, 1997), 201. 24 Foucault, ‘Preface’, 201. 25 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 221.

  9  

thus inexorably and permanently intertwined and fused together, as power/knowledge.26

Governmentality, therefore, may generally be described as a particular function or

operation of power and knowledge: ‘the conduct of conduct, and especially the

techniques and knowledges that underpin attempts to govern the conduct of selves and

others in diverse settings.’27 In other words, governmentality is the way that power

shapes thought into knowledge, and vice-versa.

There is a burgeoning field of governmentality studies within the social sciences, and

increasingly within IR. Although too expansive to examine here, this article asks if

governmentality, as an analytics of knowledge and thought, is also applicable to the

(potentially) global forms of knowledge commonly asserted within discourses of climate

change. This does not necessarily involve transcribing Foucault’s relations of

power/knowledge and government upwards, from the levels of the subject and state, to

the international and global level. Instead, as Elden has pointed out, it is rather a matter of

altering our ‘calculable understanding of space’ that has now ‘been extended to the globe,

which means that even as the state becomes less the focus of attention, territory remains

of paramount importance.’28 Indeed, this question of calculating territory and rendering

space governable taps into IR’s recent ‘global governmentality debate’,29 which generally

eschews Elden’s advice to repeat one of two theoretical perspectives: either lamenting the

faulty under-equipped ‘scaling-up’ of governmentality analytics from micro practices

within liberal states, to the macro-realm of the international or global;30 or, promoting the

                                                                                                               26 Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in Michel Foucault: Ethics. The Essential Worlds of Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: The New Press, 1997), 281-302. 27William Walters, Governmentality (Abingdon: Routledge: 2012), 38. 28 Stuart Elden, “Missing the point: globalization, deterritorialization and the space of the world”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no.1 (2005): 9. 29 Wanda Vrasti, ‘Universal but not truly ‘global’: governmentality, economic liberalism, and the international’, Review of International Studies (2012): 2. 30 Jonathan Joseph, The Social in the Global: Social Theory, Governmentality and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jonathan Joseph, ‘The limits of governmentality: Social theory and the international’, European Journal of International Relations 16, no. 2 (2010), 223-246; Jan Selby, ‘Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance and the Limits of Foucauldian IR’, International Relations, 21 no.3 (2007), 324-345. For the most heated exchanges in the global governmentality debate, see David Chandler, ‘Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism? The Limits of the Biopolitical Approach’, International Political Sociology, 3 (2009), 53-70; David Chandler, ‘Globalising Foucault: Turning Critique into Apologia—A Response to Kiersey and Rosenow’, Global Society, 24(2),

  10  

analysis of power/knowledge relations at the international and global level by

highlighting more fluid components of subjectivity, (neo)liberalism, international

organisations, etc., that circumvent the catcalls of ‘domestic analogy!’ lobbed by

detractors of global governmentality.31 Ultimately, since governmentality as a concept

emerged from a series of lectures at the College de France in an ongoing and

transforming series of lectures, and since Foucault’s thought and philosophy was

concurrently shifting and transforming throughout, like Foucault, governmentality itself

moves ‘like a crawfish and advances sideways’.32 There is no one consistent usage or

meaning of ‘governmentality’ as a term or concept. The early Foucault describes

governmentality as an historical prism through which to analyse transitions of power

delimiting state government and (neo)liberalism as coopting previous sovereign modes of

power;33 the later Foucault transitions governmentality analytics into a purely nominalist

mode of inquiry, interpreting how freedom, conscience, ethics, subjectivity, and truth,

emerge in thought to transform and conduct historical subjectivities between ethical

selves and other subjects.34 Crucial to note here, is that not all of these versions of

governmentality mix together as easily as IR scholars tend to assume: discursive and top-

down social structures may not simply mesh with bottom-up and fluid relations of

subjectivity and freedom.35 Hence, the global governmentality debate is inevitably a

Sisyphean one: an IR scholar must simply select what distinct variant of ‘Foucault’ or

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         2010, pp. 135-142; Nicholas J. Kiersey, Jason R. Weidner & Doerthe Rosenow, ‘Response to Chandler’, Global Society, 24(2), 2010, pp. 143-150. 31 Iver B. Neumann & Ole Jacob Sending, Governing the Global Polity (New York: University of Michigan Press, 2010); Doerthe Rosenow, ‘Decentring Global Power: The Merits of a Foucauldian Approach to International Relations’, Global Society 23, no. 4 (2009), 497-517; Hans-Martin Jaeger, ‘Governmentality’s (missing) international dimension and the promiscuity of German neoliberalism’, Journal of International Relations and Development (2012); Nicholas J. Kiersey, ‘Neoliberal Political Economy and the Subjectivity of Crisis: Why Governmentality is Not Hollow’, Global Society 23, no.4 (2009); Hans-Martin Jaeger, ‘”Global Civil Society” and the Political Depoliticization of Global Governance’, International Political Sociology 1, no.3 (2007); Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending, ‘The International as Governmentality’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no.3 (2007); Vrasti, ‘Universal but not truly ‘“global”’. 32 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 78; Thomas Biebricher, ‘Genealogy and Governmentality’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2008); Walters, Governmentality, 38. 33 For example, see Foucault, Security, Territory, Population; Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics. 34 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981-1982, ed. Frederic Gros (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France, 1982-1983, ed. Frederic Gros (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 35 Scott Hamilton, ‘Add Foucault and Stir? The Perils and Promise of Governmentality and the Global’, European Review of International Studies 1, no.2 (2014).

  11  

‘governmentality’ they identify with most readily, and proceed thusly without stirring the

theoretical pot.

However, despite governmentality demanding a nominalist mode of inquiry into practices

and subjectivities, scholars on both sides of IR’s global governmentality debate have

remained anchored to liberalism as the sole global medium for power and government.

For example, Jonathan Joseph argues that governmentality is fused a priori with statist

neoliberalism, reducing a ‘global governmentality’ to an uneven patchwork of

international governmentalities which cannot operate in ‘different (non-liberal) parts of

the world [that lack the neoliberal economic] social conditions necessary to allow such

governance to work.’36 Neumann and Sending, on the other hand, stress that a global

governmentality is taking shape through the global-spread of (neo)liberal norms and

institutions: Liberalism eschews borders as it ‘recasts and defines new modes of

governing at the global level, in the process producing new points of contention and

contestation in global politics’ that are superimposed on preexisting forms of soverignty-

and conflict-based inter-state relations.37 As scholars such as Corry have noted, however,

‘Put bluntly, in the current debate global governmentality is either imagined as a

(nascent) world-wide regime of liberal power or (for the critics) as a configuration of

governance tools only able to survive in patches where liberal states (or states susceptible

to liberal rule) already exist.”38 Corry is indeed correct in critiquing IR’s global

governmentality debate as being underpinned by a statist and neoliberal ontology, which

restricts the scope of debate to states and liberalism. However, it is unclear how the rigid

structural and discursive restrictions of his own ‘global polity model’ do not set similar a

priori boundaries upon how practice, thought, and knowledge, are to be analysed from a

nominalist position.39

                                                                                                               36 Joseph, The Social in the Global, 17. 37 Neumann and Sending, Governing the Global Polity, 8, 14. 38 Olaf Corry, Constructing a Global Polity: Theory, Discourse, and Governance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 52. 39 Hamilton, ‘Add Foucault and Stir?’

  12  

Genealogy: Patron of Governmentality

Instead of positing liberalism or discursive structures as the sole target or medium of

analysis for (global) governmentality analytics, this article illustrates that there are indeed

other ways to conceptualise the complex relationship between local subjectivities and

global practices and their emergent forms of knowledge. A Foucauldian genealogy, or a

‘history of the present’ that analyses the relations of power/knowledge constituting

contemporary and naturalised practices, is one such way. There is no philosophical nor

analytical barriers preventing the combination of global governmentality and Foucauldian

genealogy: indeed, ‘in many uses of governmentality the methods and sensibilities of

genealogy have been taken for granted, [and] in many others genealogy has been

eclipsed.’40 What is called for in IR, therefore, is thus to select a particular ‘ontology of

governmentality’ (i.e. the state, liberalism, the subject, etc.), and to problematise and thus

select, a specific practice to historicise, analyse, and trace, using a genealogical analytic.

Doing so should provide a detailed empirical and historical lineage that traces how the

thought, knowledge, and power undergirding subjects engaged in a practice, has

transformed and emerged into its presently yet implicitly governed form. Indeed, scholars

such as Walters, Dean, Saar, and and Biebricher have called for this combination of

governmentality and genealogy, noting that it ‘enhances the prospects of doing research

that does unsettle its objects and defamiliarizes the intellectual and political landscapes

that thought acts upon.’41 Foucault himself is also explicit that governmentality analytics

are to be conducted in conjunction with genealogy, or else one risks dangers of

‘applicationism’ that applies such concepts such as discipline, biopower, liberalism,

governmentality, etc., to situations as a priori theories or grids in a pre-determined or

anti-nominalist fashion.42 Instead, governmentality must always start from micro-

practices, or from the bottom-up, with genealogy as a nominalist toolkit for detecting

hitherto unseen, unknowable, and hence unexpected, power relations.

                                                                                                               40 Walters, Governmentality, 113. 41 Walters, Governmentality, 114; Biebricher, ‘Genealogy and Governmentality’ (2008). 42 Walters, Governmentality, 110-114.

  13  

How does one conduct a Foucauldian genealogy? In a manner reminiscent of

governmentality itself, ‘it is extremely difficult to give precise contours of genealogy’

and it is ‘impossible’ to review every study invoking its name and its terms: its

inconsistent usage throughout the sideways-shifting thought of Foucault, as well as IR

and the social sciences, have made it ‘difficult to pin down.’43 That does not stop us from

offering a brief and specific heuristic guideline here, however, so as to proceed with a

more rigourous analysis of the ‘global’ knowledge undergirding climate change.

Generally speaking, a genealogy embraces not an historical-philosophical method or

methodology, but an ‘ethos of critique’ towards our present subjectivity and its

naturalised assumptions, referents, meanings, and objects.44 The impetus underlying

every genealogy is to disrupt and escape, albeit only momentarily and temporarily, from

the realities of ‘presentism’ and ‘finalism’ implicitly shaping all thought and knowledge.

Presentism, or the ‘reading [of] present interests, institutions, and politics back into

history, into other epochs,’ unwittingly projects the constitution or content of our present

thought backwards into a past, in which this content and its meanings or referents did not

actually exist – thereby ‘writing the history of the past in terms of the present.’45

Likewise, finalism ‘finds the kernel of the present at some distant point in the past and

then shows the finalised necessity of the development from that point to the present.’46

Genealogy as critique, or as an attitude willing to challenge conceptual limits by re-

thinking history as a history of the present, thereby embraces a radical-nominalist

historicism – ‘denaturalising critiques of ideas and practices’ by exchanging an

assumedly natural linear temporal continuity, or narratives of instrumental development

or ahistorical structure, for contingency. It is to open a space, or to show how cherished

and naturalised objects once assumed as universal actually emerged into being suddenly,

unexpectedly, and through contingent relations of power and combinations of knowledge.

                                                                                                               43 Biebricher, ‘Genealogy and Governmentality’ (2008). 44 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment? in Ethics. The Essential Worlds of Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: The New Press, 1997), 303-319. 45 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 118. 46 Dreyfus and Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism, 118.

  14  

The first step in any genealogical analytic is to gauge and survey certain naturalised

assumptions that are deemed to be uncontroversial, unproblematic, ahistorical, and/or

universal. For instance, even governmentality scholars examining climate change assume

that ‘climate politics takes place in a genuinely global polity’ because it is ‘first and

foremost visualised as a global problem . . . which constructs global warming as an

inherently global field of visibility.’47 To ‘problematise’ a referent, however is not to

simply analyse a prominent problem, such as global warming. A problematisation is not

an obvious problem—that is its point! Instead, to problematise is to make something

presently considered a natural, universal, or beyond commonsensical, into a problem to

be historicised and investigated. ‘Genealogies are generally not targeted at problems that

are themselves readily apparent to everyone . . . [they] are concerned, rather, with

submerged problems . . . those that condition us without our fully understanding why or

how.’48 The very fact that these submerged problems or ‘problematisations’, as ‘acts,

practices, and thoughts’ can be examined through a genealogy, is because they ‘pose

problems for politics’ that implicitly demand applications of knowledge, expertise, and

governance. Problematisations, therefore, are contemporary answers to forgotten political

problems; implicit sites, where knowledge clashed together, and power delimited the

boundaries of thought in new and subtle ways forgotten soon thereafter. Hence, to

problematise an object is first to ask a seemingly absurd question: ‘Let’s suppose that

madness does not exist’, Foucault once exclaimed. ‘If we suppose that it does not exist,

then what can history make of these different events and practices which are apparently

organized around something that is supposed to be madness?’49 As outlined above, this

article problematises not global climate change, nor global warming, but the notion that

the ‘climate’ can itself be global. Let us suppose that a global climate does not exist.

What has the state made of it? What can we make of it?

Secondly, after problematising how the modern state conceives climate as a global

referent or object, the next step is to select an empirical practice to trace throughout time.                                                                                                                47 Chris Paul, ‘The Sky is the Limit: Global Warming as Global Governmentality’, European Journal of International Relations (2011), 9. 48 Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 41. 49 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 3.

  15  

Why a practice? A genealogist cannot simply select an idea, norm, object, or concept,

such as ‘love’ or ‘climate’ to historicise and examine in past texts. As Foucault stressed,

even ‘norms’ are ideational and intangible attitudes and representations that may affect

human behavior, but are ultimately not manifested nor brought into being in a manner

escaping the historical fallacies of presentism or finalism. There is no way to interpret

their surface. Thus, how can we avoid projecting our present idea of ‘climate’ backwards,

without assuming that its modern ideational meaning or representation is consistent over

time? This is accomplished by tracing not an idea or norm, but an empirical practice. The

practice thereby functions in history like a forgotten rock, sitting steadfastly in a river of

endlessly transforming meanings, referents, and discourses. Indeed, ‘to start with these

concrete practices and, as it were, pass these [problematised] universals through the grid

of these practices’, is the essence of genealogical analysis.50 In this article, the practice of

politicising and bringing the ‘climate’ into being as an object of, and for, politics, is what

is to be examined. If our ‘global climate’ may or may not exist, then how has politics, and

the state, acted towards the climate as an object or thing? How has it used the climate?

How has the state brought the climate into being as an object of, and for, itself?

Thirdly, every genealogical analytic must become an ‘interpretive analytic’ through the

genealogist’s interpretation of the ‘rationalities’, or ‘styles of thought’, undergirding,

framing, and situating the practice within its social background or world.51 Again, as

Foucault states,

. . . what different forms of rationality offer as their necessary being, can

perfectly well be shown to have a history; and the network of contingencies

from which it [i.e. our naturalised referent and its background rationality]

emerges can be traced. Which is not to say, however, that these forms of

rationality were irrational; it means that they reside on a base of human

practice and human history – and that since these things have been made, they

can be unmade, as long as we know how it was that they were made.52

                                                                                                               50 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 3. 51 Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 30-39. 52 Michel Foucault, ‘Structuralism and Post-Structuralism’, in Aesthetics: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume 2, ed. James D. Faubion (London: The New Press, 1998), 450.

  16  

The general rationality undergirding the problematique of global climate change, as well

as this article, may be summed up thusly: global climate change, although uncertain in its

effects, risks affecting the entire Earth, its states, and their populations, in unpredictable,

and likely adverse, ways.

Finally, the most crucial and integral component of a genealogy is what grants it its

radical-nominalist epistemological power, and its ethos as denaturalising critique:

uncovering the moment of singularity, ‘eventalisation’, or emergence of our

contemporary and modern rationality. After problematising a naturalised referent and

practice through which this contemporary rationality is currently embodied, the ‘hard

historical work’ of a genealogy begins by searching for this emergence through past

practices.53 The genealogist must now extend powers of interpretation backwards in time,

proceeding with the knowledge that their own presentist/finalist rationality shapes their

understanding and rationale, to locate a period, text, archive, etc., in which this

naturalised referent and rationality are nonexistent or absent from the practice. The most

essential and painstaking aspect of a genealogy is then the slow tracing of the vicissitudes

and transformations of various confusing, outmoded, and even nonsensical referents and

rationalities surrounding this practice, until something resembling our modern referent

and rationality suddenly and unexpectedly emerges into being. ‘I tried to locate the

emergence of a particular type of rationality in governmental practice,’ noted Foucault,

when discussing the discovery of governmentality itself: ‘[A] type of rationality that

would enable the way of governing to be modeled on something called the state’—one of

our modern political rationalities.54 Locating the emergence of our contemporary referent,

rationality, and hence formation of subjectivity in history, is what Foucault called an

‘event’: not a search for the continuity of our own historical ideas, but ‘It is instead a

question of an event: the historical emergence of a specific form of subjectivity.’55 Our

subjectivity, which ‘historically emerged where we might least expect it’, creating new

                                                                                                               53 Dreyfus and Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism, 119. 54 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 3. 55 Walters, Governmentality, 34.

  17  

spaces for problems, knowledge, and government, to fill, and to become forgotten as it is

naturalised into our contemporary, ‘universal’, rationality and understanding.56

As outlined in the introduction, our modern rationality generally perceives the

international system of states, their citizens, as recognising global climate change as a

serious threat to the future of planet Earth. Climate change is global; it yields uncertain

effects; it is caused by human agents, emitting carbon into the atmosphere; and it is

detectable only through complex mathematical GCMs fashioned by climate science, and

concentrated into the global epistemic authority of the IPCC and its member states. Thus,

“It is as though all human practices and disputes now can be – now have to be? –

expressed through the language and symbolism of climate change.”57 But, we are now

forced to ask, when did this language and symbolism emerge? It is not a matter of asking

when the global climate began to change, but of asking when climate change became

global.

Nature, Climate, Change, and (Inter)national Politics

The concept of ‘Nature’ was not always as unstable and as unpredictable as it is

understood today. Ancient ‘hunters and gatherers’, such as those in North America, saw

climate and weather ‘as manifestations of a world dense with spirits, resulting from

interactions among people, animals, and supernatural beings’.58 In ancient Egypt, the

predictable floods of the Nile were considered life-giving, because they were predictable

and beneficent; hence ‘Ra (the sun god) and Osiris (controller of the Nile) were mostly

benign’, when Mesopotamian gods such as Enlil were punitive, because winds, sun, heat,

and the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates, was so unpredictable.59 A predictable

Nature was a boon to politics, population, and a pleasant gift from the gods.

                                                                                                               56 Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, 2. 57 Mike Hulme, Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), x. 58 William K. Stevens, The Change in the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate (New York: Random House Inc., 1999), 54. 59 Stevens, Change in the Weather, 58.

  18  

For the ancient Greeks, Nature was a predictable, certain, and cyclical organism: ‘from

the Ionians to Aristotle, that the total movement of the world-organism, the movement

from which all other movements in the natural world are derived, is uniform rotation.’60

This understanding of things in Nature as being determined by the type of motion they

displayed from out of themselves, was standard Greek knowledge: ‘That is to say, how a

body moves, i.e., how it relates to place and to which place it relates—all this has its

basis in the body itself.’61 At the outset of Western consciousness, therefore, it was this

sense of physis, or ‘that from which something emerges, and that which governs over

what emerges in this way’, that was the being and place of Nature itself: Every-thing in

being emerges in a place, and strives towards its own proper place, according to its

unique natural kind: the motion and place of fire, for example, is to move upwards, as

this is its particular place in Nature; the place of earth is to move downwards.62

Politically, the only uncertain place in relation to Nature was human action: debate and

argumentation amongst plural human beings, each with a finite and rectilinear place that

cut across Nature’s perfect cyclical, rhythmic, and infinite, rotation of planets and

species-life, made politics possible.63 Humans were mortal and unpredictable, struggling

to leave some trace of their own actions in their world before they succumbed to the

endless cycles of Natural time. Such was life.

In pre-Socratic Greece, the word κλίµα, or Klima, was used in the sixth century by

Parmenides ‘to differentiate between five zones on the surface of the supposedly

spherical world.’64 This Klima or ‘climate’ as we know it today, referred to the slope or

inclination of the Sun’s rays upon the Earth’s surface, depending upon one’s particular

region or latitude.65 Socrates, however, was the first to break with the Greek

understanding of knowledge and place in Nature as physis, concentrating instead on the

                                                                                                               60 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1945), 14. 61 Martin Heidegger, ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’ in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 284. 62 Heidegger, ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics’, 284. 63 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998); Collingwood. Idea of Nature. 64 Hulme, Why We Disagree, 5. 65 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 11.

  19  

theory of mind and its operation external to the world-organism of Nature and the body.66

Separated from Klima, Aristotle later claimed that the mind, and ‘the vapours and

exhalations of a country’ were thus linked to the quality of air and the climate,67

producing the first comprehensive text written on weather and climate: the

Meteorologica, from which our modern term ‘meteorology’ is derived to refer to weather

conditions.68 The Meteorologica became ‘the Western world’s reigning authority’ on

weather and climate for more than two millennia, although its deductive theoretical

premises ‘spun out of one’s head’ and lack of ‘meteorlogical data’ fostered significant

errors.69 Ptolemy then extended the idea (eidos) of physical climates depending upon

place and latitude, by developing seven klimata that ‘persisted as the conventional

framework for explaining different climates’ from the second century AD, to the

Renaissance period.70 Where civilisation flourished, the climate was a political boon;

where civilisation perished, the climate was savage.

The Aristotelian meteorological system and Ptolemaic comprehension of Nature and

Earth’s place in the universe dominated the proceeding centuries. This was not to say that

connections between energy production and human health went unnoticed: the Romans

complained that coal usage made the air of Rome foul; the city of London passed the

world’s first (documented) air pollution law in 1273, ‘with the aim of countering the

nuisance of smoke from domestic fires’; and in 1661, John Evelyn noted that human

health, as well as ‘plants, buildings, monuments and waters, were being ruined by coal

smoke.71 However, there was no discernible political connection between energy usage,

climate, human health and politics, and especially not to spatial regions such as the globe

or Earth. Regional climates did connect to politics, however. In the Middle Ages, for

example, the crime of witchcraft replaced fear of epidemics in parts of Old Europe,

largely because ‘persecutions of inner enemies for their supposed influence on the

physical environment’ facilitated the ‘emergence of a new crime [that] was closely                                                                                                                66 Collingwood, Idea of Nature, 5. 67 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 11. 68 Aristotle, Meteorologica. 69 Stevens, Change in the Weather, 69. 70 Hulme, Why we Disagree, 5. 71 Ian H. Rowlands, The Politics of Global Atmospheric Change (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 65.

  20  

connected to the waves of climatic hardship during the earlier phases of the Little Ice

Age.’72 Witch-hunts reached their peak in the 1630s during the Thirty Years War,

connected directly to fears that witches manifested this onset of climatic instability. They

were ‘hardly ever connected with war, confessional strife, state-building, changes in

medical or judicial systems, [or] gender relations’.73 Rather than Nature, spirits, sin, or

God, the West was struggling at this point to reconcile human agency with what was now

appearing to be an unstable or uncertain climate, upon which its agriculature, order, and

survival, ultimately depended. However, as the climate stabilised and the ‘Little Ice Age’

came to and end, the crime of witchcraft dissolved into a more academic interest: how

human behavior or sin might impact local climatic conditions. It was ‘more than a mere

metaphor that the sun of the Enlightenment ended the era of witch-hunting.’74

Indeed, with new notions that humans might impact their regional climate, and with

explorations to a New World in the West being made, it was realised that Aristotelian and

Ptolemaic climatic science might be incomplete and fallible. New observations of foreign

lands, peoples, and societies, implied that it was indeed possible to prosper in more than

the seven temperate latitudinal climates delineated by Aristotle and Ptolemy.75 As the

Enlightenment got underway, led by the science of Newton and Galileo, and the

philosophy of Descartes, the seventeenth century’s explosion of science and rationalism

ushered-in an unprecedented change to Western epistemology, culture, politics, and the

place of human thought and being on the Earth and within the universe. ‘This is where

Modernity begins for many purposes’, notes Toulmin, ‘… the historical phase that begins

with Galileo and Descartes’s commitment to new, rational methods of inquiry.’76 Instead

of physis, apprehending beings and bodies in accordance with their distinct and unique

place and motion in Nature, Newton’s revolution in thought removed motion from the

place of the natural body, to the thinking mind itself: ‘All bodies are alike. No motion is

special. Every place is like every other, each moment is like every other’, and changes of                                                                                                                72 Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting: the Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities’, Climatic Change 43, no.1 (1999), 336. 73 Behringer, ‘Witchcraft’, 344. 74 Behringer, ‘Witchcraft’, 345. 75 Hulme, Why We Disagree, 6. 76 Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 9.

  21  

place are understood not as motion, but as the result of some underlying and external

force.77 Rather than cyclic Nature, the assertion of the Cartesian cogito as the new

grounds for self-certainty made the I, subjectivity, or the subiectum the new bedrock of

Western thought. To think, to be, or the cogito ergo sum, became a retranslation and

recalculation of the space and place of thought itself: Nature, not comprised of things to

be apprehended, but of objects that can be measured and represented by a self-certain

subjectivity. The I, representing objects by extending outwards from itself to re-present

them to oneself, became the new center of human thought, judgment of space, and

measurer of Nature.78 For the first time, after the Enlightenment, the climate became an

object of scientific inquiry, and not merely a thing within which being and light itself was

inclined to come to presence.

These metaphysical changes are the grounds for what Ruggie has identified (but not fully

explored) as the ‘central attribute of modernity in international politics . . . a peculiar and

historically unique configuration of territorial [and hence political] space’ engendered by

new notions of individual subjectivity against which objects, distances, and boundaries,

could be ordered and calculated.79 Representing political space and place as extensible,

measurable, calculable, and orderable from the self-certain standpoint of individual

subjectivities, thus opened new spaces for political rationalities to emerge in the West.

‘The emergence of the social realm,’ as Arendt so aptly summarised it, was ‘a relatively

new phenomenon whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern age and

which found its political form in the nation-state.’80 In other words, Enlightenment

science comprising both Nature and thought as uniform measurable place(s), catalysed

the simultaneous emergence of both society and governmentality in its political and

territorial form. ‘Nature is something that runs under, through, and in the exercise of

governmentality’ Foucault stressed. ‘It is, if you like, its indispensible hypodermis.’81

Political rationality and governmentality, in other words, is undergirded and framed by

                                                                                                               77 Heidegger, ‘Modern Science’, 291. 78 Heidegger, ‘Modern Science’, 297. 79 John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization 47, no.1 (1993), 144. 80 Arendt, Human Condition, 28. 81 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 16.

  22  

scientific and metaphysical delimitations of Nature, subjectivity, and being.

Governmentality itself is conducted, or governed, in conjunction with the science and

subjectivity it manifests. Governmentality itself, is governed by the Western metaphysics

underlying it.

The Climate as Condition

What of this new Western metaphysics and climate itself? Enlightment science,

measurement, and the formation of individual subjectivity, had a tremendous impact

upon the political relationship between climate and state. Nature ceased being a

philosophic plane or realm of apprehension and immersion, and was ‘transformed by

human action into the realm of the human – into a historical category as part of the polity,

. . . at the service of the state.’82 Although still regional in scope, the climate became

politicised as a new space and object that could be used politically, rather than simply

apprehended philosophically. ‘Climate determinism, with or without warming, is a

political idea’ that appears at this time.83 As Greek thought merged into the classical era,

for instance, a ‘widely held view’ came to assert that Mediterranean travellers would turn

black at the Equator, or else die. ‘The experience of encountering forbidding climates

through journeys into unexplored territories, and the anxieties of such climatic

encounters’, 84 exerted a powerful division between rival polities.

With objects of Nature now represented to subjectivity as instrumental and calculable

bodies of mass and energy, linear cause-and-effect relationships could be posited between

humans, the climate, and the nation-state itself. Could climate cause certain effects to

human beings, to politics, and vice-versa? As early as 1680, Sir John Chardin’s Travels

in Persia pointed to an environmental determinism of regional climate over local politics:

‘And in those countries, the goodness and virtue of the air spreads and diffuses itself over

all the face of nature, . . . [influencing] the disposition of the mind.’ As such, ‘from a                                                                                                                82 Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, ‘Making the Environment Historical: An Introduction’, in Nature’s End: History and the Environment, eds. Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 7. 83 Sörlin and Warde, Nature’s End. 84 Hulme, Why We Disagree, 38.

  23  

right observation of different climates, one may form a better judgment of the food,

clothes and lodging of the several people of the world, as also of customs, sciences, and

their industry’.85 As Fleming has noted, Chardin’s ideas diffused into ‘Modern European

thought linking climate change and culture [which] can be traced to the diplomat,

historian, and critic Abbe Jean-Baptiste Du Bos.86 His 1719 Critical Reflections claimed

that a favourable climate stimulated genius in certain nations by infusing with air, soil,

and water, to distill nationalities with a specific ‘cultural vintage’ like a fine wine.

‘During the life of a man, and as long as the soul continues united to the body,’ Du Bos

wrote, ‘the character of our minds and inclinations depends very much on the quality of

our blood . . . [which] depends vastly on the air we breathe; . . . Hence it comes, that

people who dwell in different climates, differ so much in spirit and inclinations.’87

Different nations have different characters, therefore, because of their different sovereign

climates. Suddenly, sovereign Nature gained an instrumental and political relationship to

the state itself.

With climate conceived as a predictable, national, and regional agent affecting the

political, intellectual, and cultural dispositions of national blood, ‘colonization—which

usually required settlers to move to new climatic zones—was perceived as a great risk by

Europeans.’88 Why? If sovereign climate was now equated with the intellect and political

structure of its peoples, then a savage or uncilivised climate will yield savage or

uncivilised peoples. Du Bos was confident that the wholesome air of one nation could

then act like a poison to unhabituated foreigners. Even commercial trade, which involved

the residents of one nation consuming foreign goods produced and thus infused with

another nation’s particular (potentially poisonous) climate, could be corrupting to

national character. ‘Blood formed by the [climate] of Europe was thought incapable of

mixing with the air or with the chyle’ of the New World of America, for example.89 This

                                                                                                               85 John Chardin, Travels in Persia (London: Argonaut Press, 1927), 134, 226-227. Cited in Fleming: Historical Perspectives. 86 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 13. 87 Abbe Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music, with an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Theatrical Entertainments of the Ancients . 2 vols. Translated by Thomas Nugent (London: 1748), 177-178. 88 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 14. 89 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 14.

  24  

form of environmental or climate determinism gained great purchase in intellectual and

political circles in Europe’s political and philosophical elite. Montesquieu echoed Du

Bos’s warning of changing climates, advocating in 1748’s The Spirit of the Laws that the

‘good life’ could only be lived within the same climatic region and country; hence the

nation’s geographic location determined the spirit of its politics.90 Hume, likewise,

connected discourses of modernisation and industrialisation to climates favourable to

politics: to sweep away Nature in Europe, ‘by no other method, than by supposing the

land is at present much better cultivated, and the woods are cleared, which formerly

threw a shade upon the earth’, facilitated the cultivation of advanced nations in kind.91

The colonisation and industrialisation of America was conducted with the intention of

facilitating anthropogenic climate change(s). The goal was to assume that a human-

induced warming of the climate, would make the save American wilderness suitable to

the advancing white European civilisation. Clearing away Nature through deforestation,

for instance, would ameliorate the American climate to ‘make it more fit for European-

type civilization and less suitable for the primitive native cultures.’92 Since the raw

Nature and supposed ‘savagery’ of the New World was an ‘object of disdain’ of many

European elites, a crucial element of American apologetics and propaganda was put to

the task of convincing European elites ‘that the North American continent was not a

frozen, primitive, or degenerative wasteland.’ Indeed, in the late 18th century, writers

such as de Pauw (1771) and Raynal claimed that the harsh American climate yielded

‘degeneracy among aborigines’ from a lack of ‘stamina’ compared to Europe. Manifest

Destiny as regional climate change quickly became part of the American Republican

national ideal, as expressed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson,

who are credited with taking the first meteorological measurements in America.93 These

measurements were not politically innocent by today’s standards. Utilising new

Enlightenment tools and mathematics to document weather through the recording of data,

‘Throughout his life, Jefferson maintained that human-induced climate change due to

                                                                                                               90 Montesquieu, cited in Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 16-17. 91 David Hume, cited in Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 17-18. 92 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 18. 93 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 32.

  25  

settlement would be proved by extensive measurements’,94 and thus increase the use of

American land for settling and agriculature. To change the (regional) climate was a

politically desirable move (and, it must be noted, had no relation to carbon, nor even, as

we shall see, to ice). As forests were clear-cut and settlers moved West, regional climates

would thereby retain less moisture and absorb less of the bone-chilling ‘phlogiston’ into

their vegetation and soils, alleviating the moisture-rich precipitation believed to cause

‘gloom’ and unhealthy dispositions to immigrants.95 In 1785, the physician Benjamin

Rush summarised the underlying rationality of the politics of climate change well: ‘let

cultivation always keep pace with the clearing of our lands’, he said, since ‘Nature has in

this instance connected our duty, interest, and health, together.’96 Men, in other words,

were governing the sovereign climate as an object and tool for politics. It was certain that

catalysing the regional change of this object would yield genius, health, and wealth for

the state, comparable to the European triumph over ‘savage’ native lands. What remained

however, was a way to document and study this climatic transition. How could one

demonstrate that ‘a climatic change that took two millennia in Europe’ was being

induced, in only two centuries, by the spread of European civilisation in America?97 The

answer, ‘calculation arithmetic’ wielded by the state so as to study other natural objects,

was thus applied to the object of climate, and state-istics, or as we know them today,

statistics, became prominent as the first ‘scientific’ delineator or discloser of climate

politics. As Cleveland Abbe phrased it in 1889, ‘what our present climate is, what its

well-defined features are, [depends upon] how they may be most clearly expressed in

numbers.’98

The Climate as Machine

An underlying rationality assuming Nature and climate as integrated in a balanced world-

organism, was now replaced by a new underlying metaphor explaining social equilibrium

                                                                                                               94 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 33. 95 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 27. 96 Benjamin Rush (1875), as quoted in Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 30. 97 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 48. 98 Abbe du Bos, in Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 45.

  26  

and nature as a machine.99 Just as Hobbes was reducing the ‘heart’ of a state to a

mechanical ‘spring’,100 Edmund Halley was moving beyond the Ptolemaic view of the

climate to posit a theory of trade winds dependent upon regional temperature and latitude.

‘Halley’s term “circulation”, as well as his notion that the atmosphere must “preserve the

Æquilibrium”, remains in use today.’101 Indeed, although Descartes and Newton had

provided the philosophy and rationality forming the basis of science, weather, and

climate, Descartes’s own attempts ‘to show that the weather can be explained by the

general physical principles that he believed determined the physical behavior of the

universe . . . fell into error because he still did not have the means to follow his own

advice to mistrust one’s senses in favor of quantitative investigation.’ There was no way,

until now, to quantify and measure the climate.102 This changed, however, through state-

led initiatives to systematise and standardise ‘the physicality of climate’ through national

and international networks of meteorological measurement and observation.103 Instead of

‘world-organism’, by 1839 the study of climate was, according to Oxford’s John Ruskin

of the Royal Society, ‘not for a city, nor for a kingdom, but for the world. It wishes to be

a central point, the moving power, of a vast machine, and it feels that unless it can be this,

it must be powerless; if it cannot do all, it can do nothing.’104

In the nineteenth century, ‘Meteorological number crunching ruled the day. The age of

statistics had dawned, and there began a remarkable romance between stats and weather’,

with data-gathering and national weather services ‘popp[ing] up around the planet’.105

Scientists were quick to realise that individual datum for a wide spatial area and object

such as klimata could not be accomplished individually, through previous methods of

apprehending the being of physis and compiling numerous literary journals, personal

observations, myths, or stories. Instead, to make political claims regarding a climate’s

effect on politics, the state now required extensive national and international cooperation

grounded upon uniform and standardised scientific measurements and calculations. As                                                                                                                99 Collingwood, Idea of Nature; Arendt, Human Condition. 100 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. 101 Paul N. Edwards, ‘History of Climate Modeling’, WIREs Climate Change 2 (2010): 128. 102 Stevens, Change in the Weather, 72. 103 Hulme, Why we Disagree, 6. 104 John Ruskin (1839), in Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 35. 105 Stevens, Change in the Weather, 81.

  27  

the calculable spaces became larger, the need for international integration increased. The

new object of sovereign climates as distinct calculative zones framing each state, echoes

Barry’s present insight into the construction of modern technical or ‘metrological

regimes’ as political spaces. ‘There is a physics to politics’, Barry claims, when scientific

or technical calculations craft, delimit, define, and order, new spaces within which

political debate and contestation can occur. “Metrology creates new objects that make a

difference in the world’, Barry claims. ‘When presented as information, measurements do

not merely inform – they make demands on those who should be informed.”106 In this

case, the emergence of a state’s climate as a technical object demanded to be governed

scientifically, and for the first time, internationally. This ‘initiated a new era of

worldwide observation and more rapid and homogenous data inscription as a practical

result.’107

The development of integrated systemic data-networks suddenly began in Italy, France,

Germany, Russia, Canada, the USA, and many other states, and the formation of

‘international congresses’ and conferences in 1853, 1872, and 1874, resulted in the

formation of the International Meteorological Organisation (i.e. the World

Meteorological Organisation) in Vienna in 1873. Indeed, state data and network

consolidation began as early as 1870, when scientists, now ‘answerable to governments’,

needed international information in order to strengthen their own domestic systems and

services. Weather telegraphy now ‘participated in the larger scientific project of

envisioning “the world” as a whole—a single, dynamic, coherent physical system,

knowable as a unit even though far beyond the scale of individual perception.’108 For the

first time, through international meteorological data-sharing, the planet could be

envisioned scientifically as a knowable, technical, global space.109

Yet, this knowledge served the state militarily, entrenching a new connection between

science, politics, and war. ‘Only governments and military forces, with their geographic

                                                                                                               106 Andrew Barry, ‘The Anti-Political Economy’, Economy and Society 31, no. 2 (2002): 269, 267. 107 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 43. 108 Edwards, Vast Machine, 40. 109 Edwards, Vast Machine.

  28  

reach, financial resources, and interests in practical weather prediction,’ could offer this

scale, funding, and access to advanced technologies.110 From the 1853’s ‘conference

upon the subject of a uniform system of observations on board of vessels at war at sea’, to

Samuel Forry’s extensive investigations in the 1840s at the behest of the US Army’s

Medical Department, the state was always anxious to know how regional climates

affected the biopolitical orientation, or the health, welfare, and social disposition, of their

own citizens. In 1857, for example, Blodget used data from the US Army and the

Smithsonian Institute to argue something fundamentally new about climate politics: that

Jefferson, Franklin, and other colonialists were wrong in their claims for fluctuating

American climates. Instead, ‘climates must be assumed permanent until proven

changeable.’111 Mathematically astute geophysicists exchanging equations and statistical

techniques around the planet at conferences, now rallied around this new object of stable

state climate to argue for its predictability. With empirics such as tables, maps, and

calculative physical representations of precipitation and meteorological variables, a sense

of climatic permanence coincided with increased political stability amongst

technologically prominent states, coupled with the cessation of Westward expansion in

America. As we will now see, this combination of mathematical calculation, international

cooperation and standardisation, and the agency and impact of humanity upon Nature and

the climate, was about to reach new arenas of economic, social, and political contestation

and rationality. Carbon, previously conceived by states under purely economic

calcuations of energy packaged in the form of coal, was about to enter politics as the

atom of life, economy, and energy, itself. In so doing, a newly re-stabilised ‘permanent’

sovereign climate was about to become controllable as a potentialy object of interstate

warfare.

The Climate as Statistics

Today, debates concerning global climate change gravitate around various state’s

emissions of carbon, in the form of CO2. Even climate change deniers (coincidentally

                                                                                                               110 Edwards, Vast Machine, 41. 111 Lorin Blodget (1854), quoted in Fleming, Historical Perspectives.

  29  

located in wealthy, industrialised, Western states such as the USA, Canada, the UK, and

Australia) assert as a ‘core principle’ that ‘Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant—it is a

necessary reactant in plant photosynthesis and so is essential for life on Earth.’112 Indeed,

every historical narrative of climate change and global warming now posits the growing

recognition of CO2 emissions as an obvious and inexorable independent variable for

diagnosing modern global warming. How could it ever be otherwise? Indeed, typical

historical narratives of climate science portray its developmental and linear progression

ever upwards into a smooth, instrumental, linear chain of discoveries leading up to the

present day. This is indeed the narrative that is ubiquitous in scientific and IR literature: it

begins with Fourier’s discovery in 1824, that the atmosphere traps more incoming solar

radiation than it releases, followed by Tyndall’s 1865 identification of this radiative

trapping as a ‘greenhouse effect’ dependent upon concentrations of atmospheric gases.

Climate change science, at this point, supposedly became driven by the detection of

greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rather than interpreting the cultural and intellectual

dispositions of state citizens. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius’s discovery that carbon dioxide

gas is the driver of this climatic warming change, was ‘years or decades ahead of others,

propos[ing] a theory so novel that there was no obvious experiment to corroborate or

falsify it.’113 It then took the genius of Guy Callendar in 1938 to report to the British

Royal Society that the Earth was warming due to humanity’s energy consumption,

because the burning of coal added ‘about 150,000 million tons of carbon dioxide to the

air during the past half century.’114 Finally, as the narrative goes, Charles Keeling at the

Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California ingeniously measured the rising

concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air from remote and uncontaminated locations in

Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and Antarctica.115 ‘Thus by 1960 the greenhouse effect had evolved

from theory to observational fact to dimly perceived threat.’116

                                                                                                               112 International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), website, http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=121&Itemid=67. Accessed January 4th, 2015. 113 James Lawrence Powell, The Inquisition of Climate Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 39. 114 Guy Stewart Callendar (1938), in Powell, Inquisition. 115 Powell, Inquisition, 39. 116 Powell, Inquisition, 42.

  30  

Strangely, however, and contrary to this common historical narrative, this article argues

that the acceptance of carbon dioxide as a driver for climate change was not generally

accepted by states and their citizens until the late 1980s.117 Instead of a smooth and linear

path, it took the global threat of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War, and concomitant

aspirations of states to control the regional climates of states for war, before

infrastructures, sciences, computational technologies, and discourses positing a ‘global

climate change’ wrought by CO2 could become established. Why? To begin, climate

science was never focused upon the effects of carbon or CO2 on the Earth within the

timespan of centuries; it was focused on inorganic fields of ice that covered swathes of

the Earth on scales of millennia only pertaining to geologic time. In 1824, Fourier, was

actually writing about ‘the temperature of space’ and only very generally mentioned, in

personal reflections, how ‘the effects of human industry and all the accidental changes of

the earth’s surface, modify the temperatures of each climate.’118 Likewise, as Fleming

asserts, ‘it would be a mistake, however, to consider either [Tyndall or Arrhenius] as

direct forerunners or prophets of contemporary climate concerns’, since each made their

comments on C02 and climate change only in-passing, whilst working on secondary

projects.119 Both were seeking answers to the dominant geological problematic of the

day: the cause of glacial incursions and retreats causing Ice Ages, working out tedious

statistical calculations by-hand. Indeed, Arrhenius’s 1904 book Worlds in the Making

describing the ‘hot-house theory’ of the atmosphere due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions,

was never widely read. Arrhenius did not have ‘any great concern for increasing levels of

CO2 caused by the burning of fossil fuels; instead, he was attempting to explain

temperature changes as high latitudes that could account for the onset of ice ages and

interglacials.’120 By 1910, ‘most scientists thought Arrhenius’s calculation was altogether

wrong.’121 Decades later, even Chamberlin reneged on his ‘CO2 theory of glaciation’,

which fell out of favour prior to World War I. As he wrote in 1913, ‘the number who

accept the CO2 theory is less now than a few years ago. . . . I greatly regret that I was

                                                                                                               117 Dahan, ‘The Earth System in a Numerical Box?’, 286. 118 Joseph Fourier, (1824), in Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 61. 119 Fleming, Historical Perpectives, 65. 120 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 82. 121 Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 8.

  31  

among the victims of Arrhenius’ error.’122 Surprisingly, this ‘CO2 theory’ of climatic

change and concomitant warming would not return to favour until the late 1980s. Instead,

despite the rapid industrialisation of Western states fomenting fears of a carbon-induced

global climate change, scientists and politicians remained fixated upon climate as a

regional, sovereign, stable object, wary only of the possible advance of another ice age.

The unpredictability of a climate change driven by carbon dioxide, was unknown.

Prior to WWI, climate science had hit a wall engendered by the human condition itself:

statistical calculations now took months to complete, and ‘numerical techniques capable

of approximate solutions’ to mathematical models proposed by Bjerknes’ ‘primitive

equations’ model, and Richardson’s ‘numerical forecasting method’, simply did not

exist.123 Indeed, Bjerknes and Richardson had formulated brilliant mathematical models

basically dividing regional (and by extension, global) climate(s) into a series of

‘Cartesian grids’ comprised of primitive motions of motion and state; ‘mass, momentum,

energy, and moisture are conserved in individual interactions among individual parcels of

air.’ For Richadson, this move was stimulated by World War I and the need to understand

the movement of regional winds, so as to protect troops from the drifts of poison-gas

clouds. The problem that now arose, however, was that the actual scientific and

technological practice engaging these climatic claims and models was outstripped by

lagging national and international capacity. Climate science and the state hit an

intellectual dead-end: ‘These problems led meteorologists to abandon numerical

modeling for the next two decades.’124 Regional climates, in other words, were too

complex to compute, so geological inquisitions into ice, soil, and sediment, thereby

continued to see climate only in terms of ice.

This did not stop the state from seeing and positing connections between climate and

national political dispositions, however. Similar to naturalistic understandings of political

economy, a ‘balance of nature’ hypothesis became so prominent in the early 20th century

that scientists and citizens thought ‘as plain common sense’ that Nature and climate were

                                                                                                               122 Guy Callendar, in Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 90. 123 Paul N. Edwards, ‘History of climate modeling’, WIREs Climate Change 2 (2010): 130. 124 Edwards, ‘History of climate modeling’, 130.

  32  

always intertwined in a stable balance or equilibrium. ‘Such was the public belief, and

scientists are members of the public, sharing most of the assumptions of their culture.’125

Once again, the state was stripped of its anthropogenic agency, and climate became

determinative of the success and failure of cultures, nations, and states once again.

Writing after WWI, Yale Professor Ellsworth Huntington produced a plethora of

literature positing that civilizational, world, and national power, as well as intelligence,

culture, and race, coincided with regional climate. In 1919, to take only one instance,

Huntington stressed that ‘Many people who will accept the idea that the history of

Greece, Rome, and Babylonia was greatly influenced by climatic conditions will

scornfully reject the idea that that the trend of modern business is subject to any such

control.’ However, sovereign climates ‘determine the direction in which a country’s

energies should be expended’ and ‘act[s] not only on the present generation, but on an

infinite series of past generations, determin[ing] how great those energies should be.’126

Science, and the state, now concurred that Nature and climate were balanced, certain, and

predictable within human lifespans. Climatology became a handmaiden to state

discourses of stable natural and national characteristics: climate, and its statistics, were

‘stable by definition.’127 Notably, every expert from Tyndall to Huntington posited one

single explanation, or the single cause of climate change, rather than embracing a

combination or mixture of variables or factors. Climate was a predictable machine,

operating with one gear. Until WWII, therefore, the notion of CO2-induced climate

change was mere peculiar and unattractive ‘bric-a-brac’, and even until the 1960s, ‘For a

young [climate] researcher to entertain any statement of sun-weather relationships was to

brand oneself a crank.’128 In the span of only thirty years, however, this rationality was

inverted: to speak of a ‘sovereign’ climate as determining race, culture, and state

disposition and strength, became ‘unscientific’, unintellectual, and only for ‘a healthy

population of kooks and cranks.’129 What happened to elicit this change? How did the

climate transform from a stable, certain, and predictable agent affecting humanity, to its

exact opposite?                                                                                                                125 Weart, Global Warming, 8. 126 Ellsworth Huntington, World Power and Evolution (London: Yale University Press, 1919): 241, 242. 127 Weart, Global Warming, 10. 128 Hubert H. Lamb, in Weart, Global Warming, 17. 129 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 106.

  33  

The Climate as Nuclear

Up to WWII, and reminiscent of other economic and political rationales, such as the

‘balance of interests’ and liberal notions of market equilibrium, the political rationality

underpinning the state’s view of climate was a balanced equilibrium of nature. Fueled by

beliefs in endlessly and readily available energy in the form of coal and oil, ‘It [the

economy’s impact on Nature] could grow without any problem of physical or territorial

limits.’130 Colonial governments, still driven by a climatic determinism that attributed

agency and stability to regional climates, made ‘more assertive and prescriptive’ opinions

concerning climate and historical change. J.L. Myres sums this up well, claiming that ‘it

has been nature rather than Man hitherto, in almost every scene, that has determined

where the [political] action shall lie. Only at a comparatively late phase of action does

man in some measure shift the scenery for himself.’131 Political action changed, however,

with the onset of WWII. States sought ways in which to grant ‘man’ more agency over

Nature in order to yield strategic and military advantage, and thus Generals and Admirals

incorporated meteorologists and climatologists into the state’s war machine to forecast

climatic conditions for battle, and to invent new weapons. D-Day, for instance, was

launched on 6 June 1944 instead of 5 June, only after the Chief Staff Meteorologist of the

British Royal Air Force, John M. Stagg, forecast a sudden break in otherwise cloudy and

unforgiving conditions.132 After the war, the Nazi’s V-2 rocket went from raining death

upon British civilians, to launching their weather satellites a decade later.133

Something new emerged at this time, however. What was truly revolutionary for

climatology, the state, and for humanity’s understanding of the global and the political,

was the invention and harnessing of computers during the war. Recognized by the

mathematician John Von Neumann at Princeton as a potential tool for weather prediction,

the hand-written differential equations of Bjerknes and Richardson could now be

                                                                                                               130 Timothy Mitchell, ‘Carbon Democracy’, Economy and Society 38, no.3 (2009): 418. 131 J.L. Myres, in Sörlin and Warde, Nature’s End, 30. 132 Stevens, Change in the Weather, 94. 133 Stevens, Change in the Weather, 94.

  34  

converted into computer code and simulated, thereby developing forms of weather

prediction and climate hitherto unthinkable. Statistical calculations that would have taken

20 to 30 years to complete by-hand, could now be accomplished in a single week as a

mathematical computation and algorithm. Suddenly, the limitations of the human

condition human that had plagued the state since Bjerknes and Richardson, and which

had failed to calculate the complexity of their Cartesian grids of air, were lifted: methods

for ‘minimising numerical instabilities in massively iterative calculations’ appeared as a

result of this war-time effort to develop digital computers. With ‘weather prediction’ as

the first major application of this post-WWII digital computing technology, and heavily

supported by both military agencies and civilian weather services’, a new rationality

between the state and Nature was formed: computational and calculative.134

This was not a coincidental alignment between computers and the climate. States needed

some way of calculating the effects of nuclear fallout from atomic explosions and bomb

tests. Ironically, Roger Revell, a U.S. Navy and Atomic Energy scientist studying the

nuclear evisceration of the Hawaiian island of Bikini Atoll, would later go on to use this

knowledge of radioactive uptake in deep oceans to formulate the first explanations for

why Earth’s oceans cannot absorb endless quantities of CO2, thereby legitimising

explanations for anthropogenic climatic change as they became prominent in public and

scientific discourse in the late 1970s. Still, immediately after WWII, the numerical

weather prediction models (NWPs) operated on regional scales, aiming to predict climate

over certain states, not for the globe itself. Schemes to control the climate and weather of

enemies were developed based upon these sovereign grids of computation: ‘A nation that

understood weather might also obliterate an enemy with droughts or endless snows’,

making ‘climatological warfare’ from cloud seeding and climate control perhaps ‘more

potent than even nuclear bombs’ in the Cold War.135 Gilbert Plass, for example, whom is

credited with resuscitating (along with Guy Callendar) the C02 theory of global warming

after WWII (again, in hopes of cracking the longstanding ‘mystery of the ice ages’ and

not in studying human-induced climate change), computed and calculated a global

                                                                                                               134 Edwards, Vast Machine, 130. 135 Weart, Global Warming, 23.

  35  

warming from CO2 only in spare evenings spent awar from his atmospheric weapons

research role at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation.136 In other words, up to the 1960s, the

notion of ‘global’ warming from CO2 simply did not exist: ‘geophysicists studied

phenomena within a region, often not even a nation but part of a nation,’137 and anyone

interested in climate change was obsessed with ice and geologic time, and the certainty

associated with the ebb and flow of ice sheets within a balanced view of an all-powerful

Nature.

NWPs were quickly surpassed by the need for more powerful and larger computations.

The burst of computational power after WWII thereby stimulated an entirely new way of

bringing the climate into being as an object: through general circulation models of the

climate, or ‘GCMs’ for short. Seeking to mimic the movement of molecules in the

atmosphere according to the laws of physics, GCMs break down the NWP’s ‘Cartesian

Grids’ of atmosphere into even smaller units and parcels to quantify and calculate. They

are ‘derived from fundamental physical laws (such as Newton’s laws of motion), which

are then subjected to physical approximations appropriate for the large-scale climate

system, and then further approximated’ through a mathematical process called

‘parameterisation’:138 the shrinking of physical processes of Nature and climate into even

finer and smaller grids.139 Crucially, however, the development of GCMs yielded a new

‘ontological object’ of climate in ways hitherto unimaginable before the technology of

massive supercomputers.140 and now only possible through complex computational

operations: the climate ceased being an object changed by a single cause, becoming

parameterised as an “outcome of a staggeringly intricate complex of interactions—

                                                                                                               136 Weart, Global Warming, 23. 137 Weart, Global Warming, 31. 138 IPCC, ‘Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’, Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M.Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.) (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2007). 139 Spencer R. Weart, ‘ The Development of General Circulation Models of Climate’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 41 (2010): 210. 140 Weart, ‘General Circulation Models’, 216.

  36  

something [that] could only be comprehended in the working-through of the numbers.

The printouts [of the climate] were all the explanation there was.”141

With GCMs, the climate was brought into being as a new, global, metrological regime: a

global space, reduced to fluxing grids of molecules available to human cognition only

through complex mathematical ‘parameterisations’ discernible by a handful of experts

around the world. The study of the effects of nuclear weapons, therefore, could now be

expanded beyond the boundaries of sovereign climates, to a single global climate. But

how? Although GCMs opened a new metrological space at the global level to study

interstate or transnational flows of radioactive particles from thermonuclear war,

communicating these new global climatic and spatial dynamics to politicians and foreign

scientists proved difficult. Never before had humanity had this type of access, or even

conceptualisation, of such large and complex mathematical connections to the Earth,

Nature, climate, and even international relations itself. How does one politicise the

molecular movement of carbon dioxide at the level of international politics? This was

something new. Discourses connecting the climate to both the global realm, and human

action, began to circulate between states for the first time. American and European

publics, for example, began to suspect that nuclear testing and the resultant fallout was

changing the Earth’s weather, especially since military geophysicists now utilised this

nuclear fallout as ‘new tools’ to ‘trace the flow of materials through the biosphere,

atmosphere, and oceans.’142 With public concerns that nuclear fallout was changing

weather, the ‘US Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy’ convened a special

committee and hearing in 1955 to dispel this public concern.143 Despite the 1957-58

International Geophysical Year (IGY), and increased military attention to climatological

forms of war, the public’s brief flirtation with climate change soon ended: ‘scientific

work done in the mid-1950s did not seem to make much of an impression on the general

public’, especially with the Vietnam war on the horizon.144

                                                                                                               141 Weart, ‘General Circulation Models’, 211. 142 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 119. 143 Leigh Glover, Postmodern Climate Change (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006): 71. 144 Fleming, Historical Perspectives, 128.

  37  

What it did do, however, was re-introduce the agency of humanity and the state back into

Nature, making the state’s power a destabilising agent for the climate. Once more, the

climate was uncertain and unstable, although this time around, humanity was as well:

such is life, in games of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Thus, GCMs were

expanded in scope, studying not only carbon and nuclear fallout, but other substances

such as commercial aerosol pollutants, which would also come to dominate the state and

public’s understanding of climate change in the 1970s. With a conflux of regional-global

climates destabilised by state power, and with a centuries-long focus on ice-ages, even

respected climate scientists jumped on a new bandwagon for climate change: not

warming, but a global cooling.145 Large scientific and political movements were now

oscillating between state, scientific, and climatic instability and uncertainty, to argue that

aerosols or radioactive dust from thermonuclear war would block out the sun to catalyse a

nuclear winter,146 or a global cooling.147 Whether or not it was CO2 and warming, or a

cooling caused by aerosols or nuclear winter, the point here is that climate change was

not primarily associated with a global warming, nor was it even truly global: the

powerful yet immensely expensive and large supercomputers required for GCM

modelling meant that climate science and modeling remained nationally-bound, like a

‘secret code society.’ Indeed, ‘There were so many subtleties that a real grasp required an

apprenticeship on a working model. Commonly, a new modeling group began with some

version of another group’s model . . . bringing along his old team’s computer code.”148

The Climate as Global: The IPCC

Different states now began attempting to develop different codes, yielding

incommensurable epistemologies of climate at the international scale. Climate scientists

recognizing the growing power of GCMs to quantify a global climate, as well as the need

                                                                                                               145 Stephen H. Schneider & Lynne E Mesirow, The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc, 1977); Nigel Calder, The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1974). 146 Carl Sagan, ‘War and Climatic Catastrophe: Some Policy Implications’, Foreign Affairs 62, no.2 (1983): 257-292. 147 Reid A. Bryson and Thomas J. Murray, Climates of Hunger: Mankind and the World’s Changing Weather (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1977). 148 Weart, Global Warming, 31.

  38  

for international cooperation in the collection of data, began to organise to combat this

inconsistency in the name of science. Even in the early 1970s, ‘the science was

vanishingly thin, the politics was impossible.’149 Falk’s 1972 This Endangered Planet, for

example, contains no reference to climate change in its 448 pages.150 However, under the

UN Environment Programme and the WMO, the first World Climate Conference was

held in Geneva in 1979, with further ‘Villach/Bellagio’ workshops held in Austria and

Italy in 1987, with another ‘Toronto Conference’ entitled ‘The Changing Atmosphere:

Implications for Global Security’ taking place in 1988. Despite a new air of international

cooperation at the end of the Cold War, within it ‘there would have been little funding for

the research that turned out to illuminate the CO2 greenhouse effect, a subject nobody

had connected with practical affairs.’151 Connecting rising CO2 levels to economics,

fossil fuels, warming climates, and national politics, was an accidental answer to a

question the state had never asked. However, even up to the 1988 Toronto conference,

the world had no unified answer to the climate question – Warming? Cooling? Aersols?

Carbon? Nuclear winter? Unpredictable change? Stability? Agency of humankind, within

the (un)balance of Nature? – ‘in the 1970s, the immaturity of climate science and climate

models made [international] consensus on anthropogenic global warming impossible.’152

Something was needed to integrate the (potentially) global science of GCMs into an

international, authoritative, and global, organisation. ‘Only when the Earth’s climate was

re-imagined as a global system, bringing views of the atmosphere into line with

assumptions about the jurisdiction of international institutes’, could climate change

engage states and international relations in a compelling and consistent way.153 In 1988,

the UNEP and WMO’s answer to this need for integrated and coordinated political and

scientific study and policymaking, was the creation of the largest and most integrated

global scientific institution ever constructed: the IPCC.154

                                                                                                               149 Tony Brenton, The Greening of Machiavelli: The Evolution of International Environmental Politics (London: Earthscan Publiations Ltd., 1994), 164. 150 Richard A. Falk, This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival (New York: Random House, 1972). 151 Weart, Global Warming, 31. 152 Paul N. Edwards, ‘Representing the Atmosphere: Computer Models, Data, and Knowledge About Climate Change’ in Miller and Edwards, Changing the Atmosphere, 49. 153 Miller, 51. 154 Glover, Postmodern Climate Change; John Urry, Climate Change and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

  39  

The IPCC was an unprecedented event and organisation in both international relations,

and scientific practice. Currently, it comprises 195 countries, which participate in its

review process, plenary sessions, and epistemic production. Alongside these states,

thousands of climate scientists from around the world voluntary collate and condense

their research into the IPCC’s three Working Group Reports (Science, or WGI;

Mitigation, of WGII; and Adaptation, or WGIII). Importantly, the IPCC drafts a less-

technical ‘Policymakers Summary’, which is extensively peer-reviewed far beyond even

the standards of top scientific journals, eventually being ‘approved line-by-line’ by

participating governments before its release.155 This not only ensures scientific, political,

and epistemic uniformity concerning what that climate is (i.e. a global object affecting

every state and human being), but what affects the climate (i.e. CO2 emissions emitted

from every single citizen and state on the Earth). As such, the role of the IPCC is to set

the global and authoritative standards for what climate change is, how it is caused, how

we can mitigate its affects, and plan for its predicted effects.156 As IPCC scientist

Christopher Field, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II put it in 2013:

I think the IPCC is a unique experiment. It’s a very unusual deal between the

world’s governments and the scientific community. In essence, the world’s

governments said: ‘You, scientists! If you will follow our rules, we will

consider your assessments to be the definitive statement about what’s known,

and what’s not known, about climate change.’ The unique feature of this, is

that no place else, in the whole universe of human knowledge, has there ever

been a process to arrive at a careful assessment of what’s known and what’s

not known; and that’s a critical component of bringing science to fruition.157

                                                                                                               155 Shardul Agrawala, ‘Structural and Process History of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’, Climatic Change 39 (1998): 621-642. 156 IPCC, ‘Summary for Policymakers’, in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eds. Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 157 IPCC, ’25 Years of the IPCC’, accessed October 10 2014: https://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/multimedia.shtml

  40  

Indeed, the line-by-line consensus for the IPCC’s SPMs is ‘clearly an attempt to buy

global credibility amongst governments’, ensuring an epistemological uniformity to

facilitate international policymaking.158 The policy processes and interactions between

the IPCC and governments have been examined elsewhere in great detail, and will not be

delved into here. What this article argues, instead, is that the IPCC represents the

emergence, since 1988, of a truly global form of thought, subjectivity, and government.

Indeed, although ‘There may be no comparable peacetime research endeavor or single

issue that has received the worldwide participation and involvement of the scientific

community’,159 what is unique to the IPCC is its creation, designation, and dissemination,

of what the ‘global climate’ itself, is. As we will now see, for any of us to ‘think’ global

climate change, we are enacting a form of knowledge once manifested through GCMs

and approved through the IPCC.

The Change of Climate: Global Governmentality

As this genealogical tracing of the history of climate and the state has indicated, there has

never been a consistent relationship or understanding between politics, the state,

humanity, agency, nature, certainty, and the scope and object of the climate itself. As

recently as the formation of the IPCC, the very meaning of climate and climate change

‘shifted from a local to a global understanding.’160 This making of formerly regional and

sovereign climates into a global ‘technological zone’ is cotemporaneous with the making

of a global climate as ontologically real, or as calculable, measurable, and

epistemologically knowable object – and only through GCMs, international plenary

sessions, and unanimous SPMs, of the IPCC can this object be disseminated to the world.

Indeed, as Methmann has pointed out for IR, ‘climate change consists of objective and

natural processes, it only makes sense to us in terms of discursively constituted

representations’, and these representations are ‘first and foremost visualised as a global

problem.’161 Knowledge of climate change, therefore, ‘in the contemporary sense of the

                                                                                                               158 Agrawala, ‘Structure and History’. 159 Glover, Postmodern Climate Change, 91. 160 Edwards, ‘Representing the Atmosphere’, 33. 161 Methmann, ‘Sky is the Limit’, 7, 9.

  41  

term, comes only from science’, and this science crystalises, and is politically legitimated,

within the IPCC.162 As an internationally homogenous scientific language of GCM

quantification, this new global and discursive technological zone is thus posited as a

uniform, or universal, globalised form of knowledge for states and citizens alike to

engage in policymaking and discussion. It is insensitive to place, context, race, religion,

nationality, culture, or language, making the scientific ontology, epistemology, and object

of global climate change ‘knowledge which erases geographical and cultural difference . .

. [and] in which scale collapses to the global. . . . claim[ing] to offer the view from

everywhere.”163 It is, as the IPCC asserts, globally unequivocal.

However, if knowledge is forever entwined with power, or power/knowledge, then is

Methmann’s authoritative account of ‘climate change as global governmentality’ correct

when he asserts that a ‘global governmentality’ is taking place in IR and climate politics?

Echoing Oel that ‘rendering climate change governable’ takes place on a planetary

scale,164 Methmann falls back into the trap identified at the outset of this article:

depending upon liberal economic modes of governance, or the 1999 Kyoto Protocol’s

‘Clean Development Mechanism’ of climate finance (CDM), as the medium through

which a governmentality emerges from the ‘carbonification and marketisation’ of carbon

itself.165 Yet if governmentality is not dependent upon liberal modes of governance, and

if the discursive construction of climate change for the IPCC, economists, GCMs, and ‘all

epistemic communities involved—[depends upon] the same global variable: the

concentration of carbon of the atmosphere’166—this marketisation of carbon in the

limited pathways of state’s CDM calculations betrays and conceals a deeper rationality at

play: a global biopolitics of carbon, entrenched through the metaphysical incorporation of

carbon cycles into newer generation Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models

(AOGCMs) that feed carbon as a thinkable medium to the IPCC and CDM, post hoc. It is

                                                                                                               162 Edwards, ‘Representing the Atmosphere’, 33. 163 Hulme, ‘governing global knowledge’, 559. 164 Angela Oels, ‘Rendering climate change governable: From biopower to advanced liberal government?’, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 7, no.3 (2005): 185–208; Angela Oels, ‘Rendering climate change governable by risk: From probability to contingency’, Geoforum 45 (2013). 165 Methmann, ‘Sky is the Limit’, 11. 166 Dahan, ‘numerical box’, 289.

  42  

not only liberal economics in play, but a more subtle global biopolitical grasp of life, at

its most intimate, local, atomic level of self.

If, for Foucault, the technology of biopower ‘is addressed to a multiplicity of men . . . a

global mass . . . that is directed not at man-as-body [discipline] but man-as-species’,167

and if the incorporation of carbon as vegetation, oceans, forests, plants, etc., are now

included in AOGCMs, then the IPCC becomes an institution wielding a global form of

biopolitical knowledge: a statistical centralisation of power, coupled with the

normalisation of a knowledge that implies ‘control over the relations between the human

race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and

their environment, the mileau in which they live.’168 In other words, since inclusion of

carbon cycles and vegetation in the IPCC’s AGOGCMs since the 1990s, a global

‘increased awareness of climate risk’ has coincided with the assertion of developing

nations that this ‘carbon governmentality’ serves to erase past history in the service of

present life: the environmental debts of nations that had polluted in the past in order to

industrialise and prosper, was deleted by a calculative metric that normalised and

globalised this ‘single global variable: the concentration of carbon dioxide in the

atmosphere’ which thereby ‘enables the average temperature of the globe to be

determined.’169 To focus on the global politics and economics of carbon dioxide

emissions from industry and from individuals, therefore, is not only a deletion of past

imperialist policies that encouraged anthropogenic climate change in the name of

racially-motivated colonialism and modernisation. It is to engage in knowledge, thought,

and conduct, that is simultaneously local, global, and biopolitical.170

If carbon cycles have allowed AOGCMs to bring the life underpinning global climate

change into being as an object of global climate politics, then how is this biopolitical

conduct of the globe’s, state’s, and individuals, carbonic life governed? For former IPCC

                                                                                                               167 Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended.” Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandra Fontana (New York: Picador Press, 1997), 242. 168 Foucault, Society Must be Defended. 169 Dahan, ‘numerical box’, 289. 170 See 1991 monograph, Global Warming in an Unequal World, by Indian environmentalists Sunita Narain and the Anil Agarwal.

  43  

climate scientist Mike Hulme, the metric of average global temperature is ‘rhetorically

powerful—scientifically, politically, and culturally’, but it is also dangerous, by offering

the image of planetary management or control.171 Much like GDP, this statistical baseline

is typically expressed in the range of 1.5C to 4.5C, and has changed little since the late

1970s when GCMs first became prominent.172 A norm was needed for this new

technological zone of global climate, and ‘average global temperature’ fit the bill. The

international climate regime, states, and public discourse, has thus settled on the norm of

‘two degrees celsius’ of allowable average warming for the globe, as a national and

international target. To take only one example, as reported by famed climate economist

Nicholas Stern in The Guardian in December 2014, ‘Perhaps the biggest challenge is that

governments are unlikely to outline cuts in annual emissions that will be collectively

consistent with a path that gives a good chance of remaining below the 2C danger limit of

two degrees.’173 This target, produced by the IPCC and adopted by states and citizens

therefter, thus offers a global standard and measure around which states and citizens

evaluate climate risks, and their own personal carbon expenditure and budget.174

In other words, the IPCC’s metric of ‘global standard temperature’ it facilitates the spread

of a global epistemology and shared standards of governance. But how? As Hulme also

points out, ‘Precisely because of its global origins, the global temperature itself is an

empirical impossibility. It exists nowhere and can be experienced by no one.’175 And yet,

how is it that this baseline of average global temperature has become reified by both

climate scientists, public discourse, and politicians, as the centrepiece of global climatic

discussion and debate? To put it simply, this ‘impossible’ metric is effective as an object

and norm of governance precisely because, like conceptualising the global climate itself,

it is intangible. Governmentality, or the ‘art of government’, ‘is an eternally optimistic,

yet congenitally failing practice’, operating on the basis of a desired end, equilibrium or

                                                                                                               171 Hulme, Can Science Fix Climate Change?, 35. 173 Nicholas Stern, ‘UN Agrees Way Forward on Climate Talks – But Path is Unclear’, The Guardian, 14 December 2014. 174 Methmann, ‘Sky is the Limit’. 175 Hulme, Can Science Fix CC?, 39.

  44  

result, that can never be realised or brought into being.176 [insert: examples of both states

and citizens adhering to global norm from notes] Indeed, as Barry hinted at the outset

of this article, it is the epistemic production of this quantified global average that ‘creates

new objects that make a difference in the world.’ This difference, presented as a global

baseline, is a relation of power/knowledge that pays

… little attention to the multiple ways of knowing environments, of living in

places and of imagining the future which are embedded in local cultural

practices and knowledge-making traditions. And the discourses of

sustainability, survival or decline – even when applied to specific peoples,

places and cultures – are forced to use the new vocabulary which emerges from

global kinds of knowledge.177

Conclusion

To conceptualise the modern global climate, therefore, is not to be granted direct access

to the local physis of cyclic Nature, nor is it to ponder the regional workings or gears of

Richardson’s sovereign ‘vast machine’ and its statistical constitution of national character

operating within sealed borders.178 Instead, today it is to embrace a global

epistemological perspective that orients itself around a global norm (temperature), and

conducts itself based upon its relation to life itself (carbon cycles, usage, and emissions).

This normalisation and biopolitical relation to a global epistemology and ontology of

climate implies a form of governmentality that both precedes and underpins the liberal

economic variants posited by other IR scholars thereafter: a technological and

metaphysical constitution of subjectivity, rendering at its foundation the climate as a

global object, existing in relation to one’s self, or subjectivity as an a posteriori

(neoliberal) individual subject. As Vrasti has astutely noted. ‘Global governmentality

manifests its force not through the actual number of people or states it controls, but by

acting as a standard of reference against which all forms of life (individual, communal,

                                                                                                               176 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: SAGE Publications, 2010), 33, 60. 177 Hulme, ‘governing global knowledge’, 560. 178 Lewis Fry Richardson, as quoted in Edwards, Vast Machine.

  45  

political) can be assessed according to modern conceptions of civilisation and order.’179

This order, as this paper has argued, is conceptually, epistemologically, and subjectively,

what is manifested through the locus of the IPCC as a global and technological mode of

relating to our world through ‘climate change’.

In short, this paper has offered a broad philosophical overview of how carbon, average

global temperature, and technologies bringing the climate into being at the IPCC, cohere

with the precepts of a truly global governmentality: a form of conduct that constitutes

relations of self, state, and globe, within the framed concept of ‘global climate change’

itself. This modern form of order, as the ‘unequivocal’ yet ‘impossible’ ideal of a global

average that every single human contributes to, and affects by the simple reality of being

alive, or of being composed of and exhaling, carbon dioxide, is thus unavoidable once the

concept of climate change is brought to awareness. With every breath our lungs exhale,

we contribute, ever so slightly and every single one of us, to the raising of a global

average temperature that forebodes a catastrophic and anthropogenic global climate

change for our planet. The knowledge of this uncertain future, and our stake within it, is

ultimately technological; mathematical; parametised in in accordance with the

epistemological precepts of how GCMs bring the climate into being as a thinkable and

governable object. Hence, we are now consigned to be the active agents, or subjects, that

must engage in a delicate yet crucial form of global conduct if this uncertain risk is to

ameliorated or acted upon. It is a call to recognise a technological form of global

governmentality that acts upon our actions, so that we may recognise the boundaries of

these actions in order to think outside of them, and beyond them.

                                                                                                               179 Vrasti, 16.