Drawing on a combination of perspectives from diverse fields, this volume offers an anthropological study of climate change and the ways in which people attempt to predict its local implications, showing how the processes of knowledge making among lay people and experts are not only comparable but also deeply entangled. Through analysis of predictive practices in a diversity of regions affected by climate change – including coastal India, the Cook Islands, Tibet, and the High Arctic, and various domains of scientific expertise and policy making such as ice core drilling, flood risk modelling, and coastal adaptation – the book shows how all attempts at modelling nature’s course are deeply social, and how current research in "climate" contributes to a rethinking of nature as a multiplicity of modalities that impact social life.

Contents

1. Anticipating Nature: The Productive Uncertainty of Climate Models Kirsten Hastrup 2. How Climate Models Gain and Exercise Authority Mike Hulme 3. Certain Figures: Modelling Nature Among Environmental Experts in Coastal Tamil Nadu Frida Hastrup 4. Enacting Cyclones: The Mixed Response to Climate Change in the Cook Islands Cecilie Rubow 5. Anticipation on Thin Ice: Diagrammatic Reasoning in the High Arctic Kirsten Hastrup 6. Deciding the Future in the Land of Snow: Tibet as an Arena for Conflicting Forms of Knowledge and Policy Hildegard Diemberger 7. Scaling Climate: The Politics of Anticipation Ásdís Jónsdóttir 8. Emancipating Nature: What the Flood Apprentice Learned from a Modelling Tutorial Anders Kristian Munk 9. Modelling Ice: A Field Diary of Anticipation on the Greenland Ice Sheet Martin Skrydstrup 10. Predictability in Question: On Climate Modelling in Physics Peter D. Ditlevsen 11. Constructing Evidence and Trust: How Did Climate Scientists’ Confidence in Their Models and Simulations Emerge? Matthias Heymann 12. Afterword: Reopening the Book of Nature(s) Martin Skryd>

Author Bio

Kirsten Hastrup is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.

Martin Skrydstrup is a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Copenhagen.