Dreaming the designer climate

Abstract

The dream to manipulate and control the climate has a long history. In this chapter, that longer history is explained through showing the entanglement between epistemological traditions, geopolitical pressures, and cultural imaginaries in the early decades after the Second World War. It shows that after the Second World War, both the United States and the USSR showed considerable interest in manipulating both the climate and the weather, for both geopolitical and ideological reasons. New epistemological and methodological possibilities, derived from digital computing, global measurements, and satellite imaginary, initially made it possible to imagine both prediction and control of natural systems. As the global view of the Earth took hold, however—both culturally and in scientific epistemology—the limits of such an approach became evident. As the cultural and scientific imagination of the climate system changed, climate change became the primary interest, not changing the climate.