Climate Change and Science: Climate Change Quantified

Abstract

This chapter traces the development of the western scientific understanding of climate change, from the eighteenth into the twenty-first centuries. This requires paying careful attention to the spatial, social and political relations of emerging scientific practices. The chapter shows how scientific knowledge about climate change has been profoundly enabled and shaped by the exercise of political power: by the rise of Empires, by the geopolitics of the Cold War and, in recent decades, by new transnational institutions of the United Nations. People, patronage and politics have interacted through sites of scientific knowledge production — glaciers, satellites, research ships, laboratories, computers, conference rooms and websites -- to establish climate change as a phenomenon knowable through science and hence predictable by science. Even in an era of extensive international and online scientific cooperation, ‘place’ is important for the making and transmitting of scientific knowledge claims about climate change. This is because of the influence of national state politics and cultural norms on scientific practices. The chapter shows that scientific knowledge about climate change is both political and geographical.