Imagining Climate Engineering - Dreaming of the Designer Climate https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003043553
Jeroen Oomen is a Researcher at the Urban Futures Studio of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. This book highlights the increasing attention for climate engineering, a set of speculative technologies aimed to counter global warming. What is the future of the global climate? And who gets to decide—or even design—this future? Imagining Climate Engineering explores how and why climate engineering became a potential approach to anthropogenic climate change. Specifically, it showcases how views on the future of climate change and climate engineering evolved by addressing the ways in which climate engineers view its respective physical, political, and moral domains. Tracing the intellectual and political history of dreams to control the weather and climate as well as the discovery of climate change, Jeroen Oomen examines the imaginative parameters within which contemporary climate engineering research takes place. Introducing the analytical metaphor ‘ways of seeing’ to describe explicit or implicit visions, understandings, and foci that facilitate a particular understanding of what is at stake, Imagining Climate Engineering shows how visions on the knowability of climate tie into moral and political convictions about the possibility and desirability of engineering the climate. Marrying science and technology studies and the environmental humanities, Oomen provides crucial insights for the future of the climate change debate for scholars and students. Climate engineering, a set of technologies proposing large-scale manipulations of the planetary environment aimed to counteract anthropogenic climate change, has in recent years attracted increasing attention. As meaningful climate policy remains elusive, speculative technologies play an ever-growing role in the public and, importantly, scientific imagination. This chapter introduces climate engineering as a set of speculative technologies, introducing its two major strands: solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal. Furthermore, it introduces how climate engineering might be dreamed into being based on speculative assumptions, as well as how and why climate engineering research necessitates intense scrutiny of its underlying assumptions and ‘ways of seeing’. Based on a theoretical framework deriving from science and technology studies and the environmental humanities, this introductory chapter explains how particular visions, referred to here as ‘ways of seeing’, influence visions about desirable climate engineering futures. Lastly, this chapter introduces an empirical comparison between the German climate engineering research consortium SPP-1689 and the Harvard-based solar radiation management (SRM) research conducted by the David Keith Group. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/CAHodn9_Dhqg%2BadHGU8ZFbYavew0EpHQ03xkx4ifwXdG0LmECWg%40mail.gmail.com.
