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Amidst an unfolding environmental crisis, suspicion about the totalising and homogenising spatial grammars of the 'Anthropocene' has spurred the development of a new spatial concept which, its proponents hope, can better ground the science and politics of environmental change in local geographies. In this second report on science and technology, I use this concept as a lens onto recent work in geography concerned with the space-times of 'environmental' sciences and technologies, broadly construed. The notion of the 'critical zone', and the practice of 'critical zone science', directs our attention to geographical work on situated practices of interdisciplinarity, on new modes of producing and working with 'big data', and on the volumetric, vertical and subterranean spaces of technoscientific practice. Emerging research has also engaged with the technologisation of critical zone management, while new insights into 'lively capital' and nonhuman labour push us to see the critical zone not just as an increasingly technologised space, but as itself a technology of human autopoiesis. Amidst the febrile politics of sustaining this planetary living-system, new questions are being asked about what it means to be critical in the critical zone.

The link between warfare and technological innovation has been well documented by historians. World War II was a particularly intense crucible of technological change, and the repurposing of military technologies and industries in the forging of a new post-war consumer capitalism is crucial for understanding the "Great Acceleration" phase of the Anthropocene. Processes of technological bricolage turned the machines of war onto the natural world, as global powers competed to cement their economic and imperial hegemony.

In a world of accelerating environmental crises, global pandemics and seemingly unstoppable datafication of anything that moves, thinks or feels, the politics of science and technology are pervasive. In this first of three progress reports on the geographies of science and technology, I home in on some definitional questions which an account of anything like a new or emerging subfield must necessarily concern itself. I examine how geographers have addressed the spatial effects of the making and unmaking of boundaries between science, technology and their various outsides. While work on historical and contemporary geographies of technoscience has often pulled in slightly different directions, I identify some promising convergences around questions of political economy and on the topic of scale as an emergent property of technoscientific practices. New attention is also falling on the spatial practices through which technoscience gets plugged into wider worlds, such as politics and policymaking, while geographers have also been busy disrupting, in a more experimental mode, conventional boundaries and hierarchies of technoscientific practice. Finally, the report examines recent and welcome efforts to convene new conversations around the geography of technology but cautions against the potential seduction of the new, the innovative and the 'disruptive'. Important recent work in cultural geography has purposively unsettled assumed hierarchies of 'high' and 'low' tech, new and old, and suggests that any nascent subfield of 'geography of technology' needs to reflexively attend to how boundaries get drawn around 'technology', and with what effects.

A growing body of work has explored the effects of visual imagery on shifting forms of environmental consciousness and politics. Circulating images of, for example, the 'whole Earth' have been ascribed agency in the emergence of new forms of planetary awareness and political globalism. This essay identifies a new form of global environmental image, in the shape of photographic montage depictions of future places transformed by the effects of climate change. Montage enables artists and designers to import the spatial formations of distant places into more familiar locations, in the process producing novel renderings of the interconnections of global environmental change. The future-conditional – 'if x, then y' – has become a key register of scientific and artistic engagement with climate change, and practices of visual montage have offered means of reconciling the transformations of space and time in the imagination of putative futures. The essay situates such images within a longer lineage of depictions of the tropical and the ruined, and focuses on contemporary montage depictions of climate-change-induced migration. It argues that many of these 'global montages' problematically reinforce extant notions of geographical otherness. Yet montage, as a technique, also renders visible the choices, cuts, juxtapositions and arguments which lie behind any representation, thus offering the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making.

A growing body of work has explored the effects of visual imagery on shifting forms of environmental consciousness and politics. Circulating images of, for example, the 'whole Earth' have been ascribed agency in the emergence of new forms of planetary awareness and political globalism. This essay identifies a new form of global environmental image, in the shape of photographic montage depictions of future places transformed by the effects of climate change. Montage enables artists and designers to import the spatial formations of distant places into more familiar locations, in the process producing novel renderings of the interconnections of global environmental change. The future-conditional –'if x, then y'– has become a key register of scientific and artistic engagement with climate change, and practices of visual montage have offered means of reconciling the transformations of space and time in the imagination of putative futures. The essay situates such images within a longer lineage of depictions of the tropical and the ruined, and focuses on contemporary montage depictions of climate-change-induced migration. It argues that many of these 'global montages' problematically reinforce extant notions of geographical otherness. Yet montage, as a technique, also renders visible the choices, cuts, juxtapositions and arguments which lie behind any representation, thus offering the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making.

Acts of scientific calculation have long been considered central to the formation of the modern nation-state, yet the transnational spaces of knowledge generation and political action associated with climate change seem to challenge territorial modes of political order. This paper explores the changing geographies of climate prediction through a study of the ways in which climate change is rendered knowable at the national scale in India. The recent controversy surrounding an erroneous prediction of melting Himalayan glaciers by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a window onto the complex and at times antagonistic relationship between the Panel and Indian political and scientific communities. The Indian reaction to the error, made public in 2009, drew upon a national history of contestation around climate change science, and corresponded with the establishment of a scientific assessment network (INCCA) which has given the state a new platform on which to bring together knowledge about the future climate. I argue that INCCA is indicative of the growing use of regional climate models within longer traditions of national territorial knowledge-making, allowing a re-scaling of climate change according to local norms and practices of linking scientific knowledge to political action. I illustrate the complex co-production of the epistemic and the normative in climate politics, but also seek to show how co-productionist understandings of science and politics can function as strategic resources in the ongoing negotiation of social order. In this case, scientific rationalities and modes of environmental governance contribute to the contested epistemic construction of territory and the evolving spatiality of the modern nation-state under a changing climate.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Weather, Climate, and the Geographical Imagination | Martin Mahony and Samuel Randalls -- Part I. Spaces of Observation -- 1. Atmospheric Empire: Historical Geographies of Meteorology at the Colonial Observatories | Simon Naylor and Matthew Goodman -- 2. Imperial Oscillations: Gilbert Walker and the Construction of the Southern Oscillation | George Adamson -- 3. The Weather Ship: Networks, Disasters, and Imaginaries after 1945 | Katharine Anderson -- 4. Looking for the Leeuwin: An Environmental History of the Leeuwin Current | Ruth A. Morgan -- Part II. Horizons of Expectation -- 5. Imagined Geographies of Climate and Race in Anglophone Life Assurance c. 1840-1930 | James Kneale and Samuel Randalls -- 6. The British Women's Emigration Association and Climate(s) of South Africa | Georgina Endfield -- 7. Race and Rainmaking in the Twentieth-Century Southern Africa | Meredith McKittrick -- 8. Weather, Climate, and the Colonial Imagination: Meteorology and the End of Empire | Martin Mahony -- Part III. Atmospheric Engtanglements -- 9. Darwinian Hippocratics, Eugenic Enticements, and the Biometeorological Body | David N. Livingstone -- 10. Civilization, Climate, and Ozone: Ellsworth Huntington's "Big" Views on Biophysics, Biocosmics, and Biocracy | James Rodger Fleming -- 11. The Shaded Modernism of the Global Interior: Climate and Risk in the Architecture of MMM Roberto, Rio de Janeiro, 1936-1955 | Daniel A. Barber -- Afterword: Historiographies and Geographies of Climate | Mike Hulme -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index.

In this study, we review work which seeks to understand and interpret the place of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) within the science and politics of climate change in the context of a post‐Paris polycentric governance regime and the culture of "post‐truth" politics. Focusing on studies of how the IPCC has sought to maintain a boundary between the scientific and the political, we offer an historical account of "boundary work" within the IPCC which is instructive for thinking, in an anticipative mode, about emerging and likely challenges to the IPCC's position as a science–policy boundary organization. We suggest that the relationships between climate science and policy are undergoing fundamental transformation in light of the Paris Agreement, and contend that the IPCC will need to be nimble and reflexive in meeting new challenges. Growing calls for more "solution‐oriented" assessment question the IPCC's positioning at the science—politics boundary, where it can function to put some policy options on the table, while obscuring others. Recent controversies over proposed mitigation solutions are indicative of likely future challenges. We suggest that by adopting a mode of "responsible assessment," the IPCC can continue to exercise its world‐making power in a relevant and legitimate fashion.

Anthropogenic climate change has been presented as the archetypal global problem, identified by the slow work of assembling a global knowledge infrastructure, and demanding a concertedly global political response. But this 'global' knowledge has distinctive geographies, shaped by histories of exploration and colonialism, by diverse epistemic and material cultures of knowledge-making, and by the often messy processes of linking scientific knowledge to decision-making within different polities. We suggest that understanding of the knowledge politics of climate change may benefit from engagement with literature on the geographies of science. We review work from across the social sciences which resonates with geographers' interests in the spatialities of scientific knowledge, to build a picture of what we call the epistemic geographies of climate change. Moving from the field site and the computer model to the conference room and international political negotiations, we examine the spatialities of the interactional co-production of knowledge and social order. In so doing, we aim to proffer a new approach to the intersections of space, knowledge and power which can enrich geography's engagements with the politics of a changing climate.

Non-technical summary: In the post-Paris political landscape, the relationship between science and politics is changing. We discuss what this means for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs) as a window into the fraught politics of producing policy-relevant pathways and scenarios. We suggest that pathways and scenarios have a 'world-making' power, potentially shaping the world in their own image and creating new political realities. Assessment bodies like the IPCC need to reflect on this power, and the implications of changing political contexts, in new ways. Technical summary: Following the adoption of the Paris Agreement of December 2015, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has begun to reconsider its role in the climate regime. Based on work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), we reconstruct how the IPCC has historically positioned itself between climate science and policy-making. We then discuss particular challenges raised if the IPCC is shifting along the spectrum from attributing causes and detecting impacts of global warming towards projecting policy solutions, including emerging technologies, by examining recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs). We conclude that the IPCC exercises a 'world-making' power by providing new, politically powerful visions of actionable futures, for example, based on speculative technologies of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). The task of providing future pathways poses great challenges to conventional ideals of scientific neutrality. We argue that the growing political demand for pathways, and their political significance, requires rethinking modes of assessment that go beyond expert-driven neutral input. Assessment processes must take into account their political contexts and implications in a systematic way.

Anthropogenic climate change has been presented as the archetypal global problem, identified by the slow work of assembling a global knowledge infrastructure, and demanding a concertedly global political response. But this 'global' knowledge has distinctive geographies, shaped by histories of exploration and colonialism, by diverse epistemic and material cultures of knowledge-making, and by the often messy processes of linking scientific knowledge to decision-making within different polities. We suggest that understanding of the knowledge politics of climate change may benefit from engagement with literature on the geographies of science. We review work from across the social sciences which resonates with geographers' interests in the spatialities of scientific knowledge, to build a picture of what we call the epistemic geographies of climate change. Moving from the field site and the computer model to the conference room and international political negotiations, we examine the spatialities of the interactional co-production of knowledge and social order. In so doing, we aim to proffer a new approach to the intersections of space, knowledge and power which can enrich geography's engagements with the politics of a changing climate.

How climate models came to gain and exercise epistemic authority has been a key concern of recent climate change historiography. Using newly released archival materials and recently conducted interviews with key actors, we reconstruct negotiations between UK climate scientists and policymakers which led to the opening of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in 1990. We historicize earlier arguments about the unique institutional culture of the Hadley Centre, and link this culture to broader characteristics of UK regulatory practice and environmental politics. A product of a particular time and place, the Hadley Centre was shaped not just by scientific ambition, but by a Conservative governmental preference for 'sound science' and high evidential standards in environmental policymaking. Civil servants sought a prediction programme which would appeal to such sensibilities, with transient and regional climate simulation techniques seemingly offering both scientific prestige and persuasive power. Beyond the national level, we also offer new insights into the early role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and an evolving international political context in the shaping of scientific practices and institutions.

How climate models came to gain and exercise epistemic authority has been a key concern of recent climate change historiography. Using newly released archival materials and recently conducted interviews with key actors, we reconstruct negotiations between UK climate scientists and policymakers which led to the opening of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in 1990. We historicize earlier arguments about the unique institutional culture of the Hadley Centre, and link this culture to broader characteristics of UK regulatory practice and environmental politics. A product of a particular time and place, the Hadley Centre was shaped not just by scientific ambition, but by a Conservative governmental preference for 'sound science' and high evidential standards in environmental policymaking. Civil servants sought a prediction programme which would appeal to such sensibilities, with transient and regional climate simulation techniques seemingly offering both scientific prestige and persuasive power. Beyond the national level, we also offer new insights into the early role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and an evolving international political context in the shaping of scientific practices and institutions.

How climate models came to gain and exercise epistemic authority has been a key concern of recent climate change historiography. Using newly released archival materials and recently conducted interviews with key actors, we reconstruct negotiations between UK climate scientists and policymakers which led to the opening of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in 1990. We historicize earlier arguments about the unique institutional culture of the Hadley Centre, and link this culture to broader characteristics of UK regulatory practice and environmental politics. A product of a particular time and place, the Hadley Centre was shaped not just by scientific ambition, but by a Conservative governmental preference for 'sound science' and high evidential standards in environmental policymaking. Civil servants sought a prediction programme which would appeal to such sensibilities, with transient and regional climate simulation techniques seemingly offering both scientific prestige and persuasive power. Beyond the national level, we also offer new insights into the early role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and an evolving international political context in the shaping of scientific practices and institutions.