A Political Genealogy of Meteorological Government

• In Event: 4160 - Social Theory for Our Grandchildren: Humanity’s Future in Theoretical Perspective

Abstract

This paper uses historical analysis of climate science in the US (from its late colonial origins and into its projected futures) to argue that the dynamics of how scientists came to measure, know, and understand climate have changed over time as a result of struggles within the scientific enterprise intersecting with state-making practices and broader practices of government. I theorize this process as meteorological government. I define meteorological government as the process by which actors deploy meteorological knowledge to constitute, categorize, and calculate climatic and social orders simultaneously. This paper outlines the basis for this theory, drawing from empirical analyses of three consecutive transformations in basic understandings of climate. The first understanding, prevalent from 1780 to the 1840s encompassed ‘climate’ as a body/atmospheric dynamic. This locus transformed when meteorology, as a scientific enterprise, intersected bureaucratic state formation and industrial capitalism from the 1850s to 1920. Over the course of this period, professional climatologists helped to rationalize climate as a statistically “stable” (that is, temporally unchanging) category tied to delineated geographic areas. Meteorological government in these terms began to unravel in the mid-20th century. In particular, as a result of the tight integration of atmospheric scientists and new scientific institutions in the post-WWII context, scientists elaborated an understanding of global climate as a radically destabilizing system. A conundrum ensued by the 1980s, when climate science became politicized in a way that fragmented the existing and emerging relationships between science, the state, and capital. I conclude by showing how a historicized theory of meteorological government sheds light on the plausible long-term future relationship between climate change, science, and governmentality, which likely entails a fragmentation of climate expertise and a central concern with geopolitical security for protected and “adaptive” classes. To the latter, the full paper will draw on empirical analysis of ‘climate security’ expertise and suggest how that may field may become dominant—and deeply problematic—in a post-Trump or otherwise immediately counter-populist political environment.

Author

• Zeke Baker, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin.