Emil Flatø - When Science Could Not Wait

“If we wait to let the atmosphere ‘perform the carbon dioxide experiment,’” the climate modeler William Welch Kellogg remarked in 1978, “we will finally learn how well our models have served in making these predictions of climate change. But then it will be too late to do much about it.”

Kellogg’s statement summarizes the unique epistemological quandary of anthropogenic climate change in the 1970s. Even in the worst of cases, the unraveling of global warming was decades away. Its dangers made it imperative to know more about the risks, but as a future prospect, climate change could not be accessed through the classic scientific practices of experiment and empirical observation. There was also a more foundational challenge: as a future that would be conditioned by social factors such as fossil fuel emissions, consumption levels, and energy use, climate change confounded earth systemic prediction with social analysis and political planning. Kellogg’s preferred solution was institutionalized by the World Meteorological Organization, and, later, the International Panel on Climate Change: integrated human-earth modeling. At that, climate science entered the business of premediating not only the future of climate change, but the future of civilization.

In this lecture, Emil Flatø will discuss the historical evolution of human-earth modeling, following a network of U.S. postwar technoscientific elites and their allies—climate modelers, cybernetic management experts, energy strategists, science-policy entrepreneurs, computer scientists, and canny public relations operators—across the capitalist bloc. Allegedly disinterested by the present, these experts believed they could rise above the short-termism of democratic politicians with their four-year election cycles. Yet, Flatø demonstrates that human-earth modeling relied on profound synchronizations with the assemblage of social sectors that gave the postwar United States its particular dynamism. Precisely as industrial society was faced with a profound challenge to running business as usual, the imperatives of efficiency circumscribed expert responses to the looming crisis.

Emil Flatø, Assistant Professor at New York University

Contact [email protected] and [email protected] with any questions.

This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.

Sponsoring Organizations:

• Columbia University in the City of New York
• NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
• The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• The New York Academy of Medicine
• The New York Academy of Sciences

Host or Publisher The Center for Science and Society