Renormalising climate intervention

Abstract

In June 1988, anthropogenic climate change became a global public and political concern. With the ‘summer of climate’, inadvertent climate change definitively pushed out deliberate climate interventions as the primo concern of climate scientists and politicians. This chapter chronicles how the early climate change debate provided a rather adversarial atmosphere for climate engineering research, while simultaneously already being primed for renormalisation of climate interventions. This chapter outlines how climate change denial, political lethargy, and continued ideological trust in technoscientific solutions for environmental problems all worked together to renormalise the thought of actively intervening in the Earth’s climate. Interweaving several critical moments in the development of the contemporary climate engineering research field—the 2006 intervention by Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2009 climate negotiation failures in Copenhagen, the Paris Agreement—with cultural and scientific views on the climate and on climate engineering, this chapter explains and examines the boundaries that contemporary climate engineers operate in.