Politics and Technology in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

• In Event: Climate Change, Science, and Theory

Abstract

This essay investigates the tensions in critical discussions about the IPCC (and thus science-policy interfaces broadly) between science and politics. To investigate this tension, I ask how experts, algorithms, and the models they produce to foster prediction, affect human freedom? In answering this question, I investigate the political imagination of the IPCC. In Section 1, I address how authors have assessed practices and discourses in the IPCC in IR and related disciplines. In particular, I examine the commentary on the general circulation models (GCMs) used by IPCC, have drawn criticism from humanist critics and ‘AI’ devotees alike. For some, GCMs demonstrate the underlying logic of the IPCC: the world (it’s subjects and nature itself) is a predictable, calculable, and orderable set of objects. For others, GCM’s are not technologically advanced enough and are thus blunt instruments in need of replacement. In Section 2, I question whether the IPCC has the potential to foster action beyond technocratic notions of political action that require mastery of earth and future, but also notions of political action that insist on a plurality of actors, uncertainty, and humanity’s right to a future tense. I do so by engaging with IPCC policy reports, general circulation models, and leadership speeches. Drawing from interviews with IPCC experts I conducted over the course of three months, in Section 3, I further interpret what political action means for the IPCC. A closer look at disciplinary relations within the IPCC based on interview data with experts in the three working groups, reveals that predictive algorithms and expert-rule is central to the IPCC, but that central actors are are heterogenous and often democratically and poetically oriented.

Author

• Glen Billesbach, The University of Florida