Suchergebnisse

The imagined Antarctic : extremes and exceptions -- Antarctic environmental history : engaging and arranging things -- Sensing the ice : expert intimacy with data -- Samples and specimens at Antarctic biosecurity borders -- Managing Antarctic science in an epistemic technocracy -- Tectonic time and sacred geographies at the Larsemann Hills -- Charismatic data and climate change -- Conclusion : governance in technocratic natures

This paper analyses relationships that Antarctic glaciologists (including field scientists, modellers, and those working with remote satellite data) have formed with the Antarctic glacial environment. These relationships contribute to understandings about the tactile and experiential nature of scientific expertise, even when the experts claim to know little scientifically. Expert extrapolations about nature in the absence of data hint at the intimacy of field scientists with the environment with which they work, and of modellers with the virtual worlds with which they interact. However, my research on sensory engagement among scientists also makes apparent the ways in which the embodied and sensorial are not primitive, elemental, basic, or instinctual, but bound up in the complexities of nationalism, scientific translations of scale, and boundary skirmishes over what counts as expertise from within scientific disciplines. Expertise is formed in the spaces between intimate encounters in relationship with the weight of cultural learning that teaches experts‐in‐the‐making how to encounter, analyse, compare, and interpret.

At the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings, an Indian delegate proposed a new research base located within an environmental protection area, because it is where India and Antarctica were connected on the 125‐million‐year‐old continent of Gondwana. How did this claim come to be successful for the Indian Antarctic Program? In the production of documents within international governing bodies, policy makers enroll allies, emphasizing particular aspects of their plans to members of diverse epistemic communities. Instead of trying to make nationally oriented ideas work through uniform procedural rules, international policy makers reshape the contours of acceptable policy‐making procedure and the political possibilities of international governance.

How and why did the scientific consensus about sea level rise due to the disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), expressed in the third Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment, disintegrate on the road to the fourth? Using ethnographic interviews and analysis of IPCC documents, we trace the abrupt disintegration of the WAIS consensus. First, we provide a brief historical overview of scientific assessments of the WAIS. Second, we provide a detailed case study of the decision not to provide a WAIS prediction in the Fourth Assessment Report. Third, we discuss the implications of this outcome for the general issue of scientists and policymakers working in assessment organizations to make projections. IPCC authors were less certain about potential WAIS futures than in previous assessment reports in part because of new information, but also because of the outcome of cultural processes within the IPCC, including how people were selected for and worked together within their writing groups. It became too difficult for IPCC assessors to project the range of possible futures for WAIS due to shifts in scientific knowledge as well as in the institutions that facilitated the interpretations of this knowledge.

Climate anthropology has broadened over the past decade from predominately locally focused studies on climate impacts to encompass new approaches to climate science, mitigation, sustainability transformations, risks, and resilience. We examine how theoretical positionings, including from actor–network theory, new materialisms, ontologies, and cosmopolitics, have helped expand anthropological climate research, particularly in three key interrelated areas. First, we investigate ethnographic approaches to climate science knowledge production, particularly around epistemic authority, visioning of futures, and engagements with the material world. Second, we consider climate adaptation studies that critically examine discourses and activities surrounding concepts of vulnerability, subjectivities, and resilience. Third, we analyze climate mitigation, including energy transitions, technological optimism, market-based solutions, and other ways of living in a carbon-constrained world. We conclude that anthropological approaches provide novel perspectives, made possible through engagements with our uniquely situated research partners, as well as opportunities for opening up diverse solutions and possible transformative futures.

Discerning Experts assesses the assessments that many governments rely on to help guide environmental policy and action. Through their close look at environmental assessments involving acid rain, ozone depletion, and sea level rise, the authors explore how experts deliberate and decide on the scientific facts about problems like climate change. They also seek to understand how the scientists involved make the judgments they do, how the organization and management of assessment activities affects those judgments, and how expertise is identified and constructed. Discerning Experts uncovers factors that can generate systematic bias and error, and recommends how the process can be improved. As the first study of the internal workings of large environmental assessments, this book reveals their strengths and weaknesses, and explains what assessments can—and cannot—be expected to contribute to public policy and the common good