Models: The Climate Crisis and its Uncertain Mediations

Hoyng, Rolien (2024) Models: The Climate Crisis and its Uncertain Mediations. In: EASST-4S 2024, 2024-07-16 - 2024-07-19.

Abstract

This paper positions models as particular digital objects that are part and parcel of climate technologies. Starting with climate science, an Earth systems model is a proxy that does the work of standing in. It replaces the overwhelming complexity of the climate that can only be apprehended via producing a synoptic form, an abstraction. The endeavour of modelling Earth systems seems predisposed for incremental discovery only if one assumes a fixed ontology that becomes calculable with increased computational power. Yet such objectivism is challenged by manifestations of agencies that for Stengers (2014) invoke the name of Gaia and to which Clark and Szerszynski (2020) respond with the idea of planetary multiplicity: a restless planet that is “self-incompatible,” “out of step” with itself, and “self-differentiating.” This paper asks how physical, aleatory uncertainty shapes these models, introducing an interplay of aleatory and epistemological certainty and uncertainty, constituting models as uncertain mediations of uncertainty. Furthermore, my paper suggests how the resulting interplay of certainty/uncertainty of models resonates in actionable climate technologies that draw on climate science but also displace it by extending abstraction into agendas of manipulation. Climate technologies constitute planetary predicaments (Whitington and Oguz 2023) in that planetary processes are abstracted and calculated but remain speculative and “shot through with alterity, uncertainty, and apprehension” (155). Referencing concrete, actionable models that in one way or another adapt features from climate models, I gesture toward the various ways in which uncertainty is alternatively erased, translated, externalized, exploited, cultivated, et cetera.