Samuel Randalls

COMMODIFYING THE ATMOSPHERE: ‘PENNIES FROM HEAVEN’?*

Abstract The atmosphere may be the most valuable resource on Earth and is worth orders of magnitude more to society than it costs as a hazard. However, the atmosphere, and information about the atmosphere, are increasingly being transformed from being considered as part of a global commons to being conceived of as a global commodity to be bought and sold. There are three basic types of atmospheric commodity: firstly, the material atmosphere itself; secondly, the physical properties of the atmosphere; and thirdly, data or information or predictions about the atmosphere. The global expenditure on national meteorological and climatological services and research has now been surpassed by the value of new economic instruments such as weather derivatives and climate emissions trading. Atmospheric scientists, climatologists and physical geographers need to be critically aware of what the consequences, both positive and negative, of these developments for science and society might be. This is particularly the case as climate change is increasingly providing new discourses for companies and governments to exploit as the atmosphere becomes a tradable green resource. This paper attempts to construct an initial critical framework of analysis drawing from broader literatures on the commodification of nature.

Geography, Ontological Politics and the Resilient Future

Applications of ‘resilience’ have stretched it to the point of breaking, yet it still maintains a remarkable capacity to organize relations in diverse fields of geographical concern such as ecological management, development, security, psychology and urban preparedness. Critical takes on resilience have emphasized its neo-liberal roots and utility. Whilst we do not disagree with this stance, our critical intervention argues that there are multiple resiliences invoking differing spatialities, temporalities and political implications and that this multiplicity is an important part of the work that resilience can do. We explore diverse mobilizations of resilience thinking across a wide array of empirical domains drawing out the differing ontological bases of resiliences and the interventions meant to promote them, particularly given the tension between a desire for open, non-linearity on the one hand and a mission to control and manage on the other. Rather than take resilience to be a determinedly new shift in policymaking, we explore how the post-political qualities of ‘resilience multiple’ can enable changes in behaviours and practices that slide between conflicting and contestable visions of the good life and desirable futures. We argue that the only way to critically interrogate resilience is to force the question of particulars in its diverse articulations, and, thus, geographers should engage in debating the ontological politics of resilience multiple.

Framing the challenge of climate change in Nature and Science editorials

Through their editorializing practices, leading international science journals such as Nature and Science interpret the changing roles of science in society and exert considerable influence on scientific priorities and practices. Here we examine nearly 500 editorials published in these two journals between 1966 and 2016 that deal with climate change, thereby constructing a lens through which to view the changing engagement of science and scientists with the issue. A systematic longitudinal frame analysis reveals broad similarities between Nature and Science in the waxing and waning of editorializing attention given to the topic, but, although both journals have diversified how they frame the challenges of climate change, they have done so in different ways. We attribute these differences to three influences: the different political and epistemic cultures into which they publish; their different institutional histories; and their different editors and editorial authorship practices.Editorials in multi-disciplinary journals can influence professional scientists and wider public discourse. This study compares how editorials on climate change in Nature and Science have changed over time and in response to wider political events

Applied meteorology and climatology

The relationship between geographers and study of the atmosphere has not always been straightforward. Lingering concerns about climatic determinism, especially as espoused by Ellsworth Huntington in the early 20th century, haunted the attempts of social scientists interested in the effects of climate on society (Rayner, 2003), while at the same time physicists took the lead in meteorology leaving physical geographers with the perceived unscientific and rigour-lacking climatology (Koelsch, 1996). Writing in 1965 in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Crowe (1965: 1) argued that, within geography, climatology’s ‘devoted adherents are few and forward progress during the last Brückner cycle has not been noteworthy. Indeed, it could be said that climatologists have abandoned their cycles before equipping themselves with an attractive bandwagon’. How rapidly this was to shift in the context of emerging interest in global climatic changes from the 1970s onwards! Despite the arguably limited quantity, geographers and other social scientists had explored many interesting questions about weather, climate and society. For example, urban climatologists, like Tony Chandler, explored the design of urban spaces and their influence on local climatic patterns, a field that has been somewhat sidelined in the rush to ascribe causal power to global rather than local climatic changes (Janković and Hebbert, 2012), though of course exceptions exist especially as related to air pollution. In the 1960s and early 1970s there was a spate of influential applied climatology/ textbooks and edited volumes from climatologists such as John Griffiths (1966), Roger Barry and Richard Chorley (1968), James Taylor (1970, 1972, 1974), David Gates (1972), John Oliver (1973), John Mather (1974), Tim Oke (1978) and John Hobbs (1980). One of the key academic papers at this time was by Werner Terjung (1976), who envisaged a new form of geographical climatology, operationalized through systems theory, to combine both physical and human geography approaches to solve real-world problems. Outside geography, John Maunder (1970, 1989) explored climatic resources and their value for and impact on economic activity, and Mikhail Budyko (1974) published the seminal Climate and Life. These texts, advanced in the 1960s and 1970s, developed an atmospheric resource and hazard approach showing that these relations were rarely simple, but had important consequences for weather-sensitive industries. Indeed, farsighted companies could improve their economic

Resilience and the politics of multiplicity

In this response to the commentaries, we expand on the intent behind the format of our article, which was undertaken in order to understand how resilience might be politically taken to task in light of the divergent ways in which it appears in the world. We take on (and sympathize with) the critique that our article sacrifices the ethnographic depth central to Mol’s work on ontological politics, which forms the conceptual backbone of our arguments. Although this approach could not dig deep into each instance, we argue that it did allow common currents of resilience politics to come to the fore, namely, questions concerning ontologies of site and intervention that should be asked of all resilience enactments. From here, we engage with the different commentaries related to politics and critical thought and insist on our core concern that ontologies of site and intervention are crucial for interrogating security, care, and responsibility, which are fundamentally at stake in all resilience governance. Finally, we reflect on ways in which our article was perhaps not multiple enough and draw encouragement from the commentaries that applied our questions of site and intervention to the authors’ own situated perspectives or areas of study, in particular through indigenous ontologies. These are taken as illustrations of the value of attending to the ontological politics of resilience multiple by forcing questions of power/knowledge, responsibility and value that scratch beneath the surface of current resilience fashions.

Creating positive friction in the Anthropo(s)cenes

In responding to Castree’s argument that geographers can and should encourage the production of a wider set of knowledges within the Anthropo(s)cene communities, I suggest such a process needs to: first, recognize the multiplicity of the Anthropo(s)cene scientifically, politically and ethically; and second, actively participate in the politics of the Anthropo(s)cene by providing positive friction. This concurs with much of Castree’s article and emphasizes the necessity of recognizing the intertwined science–politics of the Anthropo(s)cenes, the importance of asking awkward historical questions and the value of foregrounding debates about the future lives we wish to lead and planet we wish to inhabit.

Just Enough: An Introduction

The concept of ‘enough’ is highly polysemous and in its diverse invocations is always already value-laden and political. The introduction traces current articulations of ‘enough’ and argues that these need to be placed within a historical and comparative context that highlights the often hidden multiplicity of its cultural and political resonance. ‘Enough’ is often malleable and changing in relation to new desires, technologies or values. Drawing on the chapters in this volume, the concept of ‘enough’ is suggested to be more complex than quantitative measures can resolve. These various case studies also prompt critical thought about the politics of sufficiency more broadly and which pose important questions for sustainability proponents.

Assembling climate expertise: Carbon markets, neoliberalism and science

Using carbon markets as an example, the chapter demonstrates the potential value of assemblage thinking to understanding the emergence of market-oriented climate change policy interventions. Through exploring the historical emergence of aspirations and plans for carbon markets, the role of political actors in their actual formation and the way in which these markets have been re-configured in the event of various crises, the chapter highlights that carbon markets are neither a simple neoliberal fix for climate change nor a stable formation that has successfully internalized and translated diverse actants. Rather, carbon markets are continually being re-assembled in ways that enhance and at the same time provide opportunities to challenge existing political-economic ideas.