Thinking like a climate

Abstract

This paper explores the ontological implications of global climate change as climate science becomes grounds for politics. Prompted by parallels between what I call ‘climate thinking’ and recent philosophical work on the materiality of scientific practice, the paper draws on the work of Karen Barad to explore the ontological contours of scientific descriptions of anthropogenic climate change and the implications of this ontology as it gets taken up in politics. The paper explores how consensus around the reality of climate change has begun to shift the focus of climate politics away from the issue of uncertainty towards the question of the appropriate sites and agents of political action. Focusing on the relationship between the materiality of climate change enacted by scientific descriptions of a changing climate and the political responses these descriptions have provoked, the paper argues that approaching climate as a political material is far from a retreat from a more humanist version of politics. Rather, an attention to climate ontology in fact leads to the observation that climate change is reintroducing political questions of agency, ethics, and responsibility into domains where these questions have been until now bracketed out as issues of social and not scientific concern.