Digital modeling and the climate crisis

Hoyng, Rolien (2025) Digital modeling and the climate crisis. In: De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Cultures :. WALTER DE GRUYTER GMBH, pp. 469-477. ISBN 9783111316581

Abstract

The climate crisis is sensed and experienced through digital models. Mapping the diffractive mediations and the differential experiences that models as part of climate technologies afford, opens up political and ethical questions over climate justice. This chapter locates the politics of digital models in interplays of un/certainties as well as dynamics between speculation and quantification. I discuss two key examples. First, the dominant, quantified and certainty-asserting discourse on climate change exists in opposition to climate denialism, yet this paradigm may involve its own kind of quantified denialism regarding planetary uncertainty implied in notions of the Anthropocene. Second, AgriTech’s models in smart farming support the transposition of the climate-induced radical uncertainty that farmers face into figures of calculated risks. But this raises questions over what kinds of risks become calculated and subsequentially financialized, whereas other uncalculated forms of harm remain externalized, increasing precarity. Climate computation and quantification enable certain forms of agency, but at the expense of learning to act in the face of uncertainty. Keywords: climate change, politics of models, digital ecologies, quantification, uncertainty and risk, Anthropocene