Katherine Buse, IFK Postdoctoral researcher discusses the ways that climate models mediate time, space, and events, exploring the implications for humanistic understandings of planetary climate. The peculiarities of early general circulation models developed by Nobel Laureate Syukuro Manabe in the 1960s and 70s help to illustrate the form of the climate model as media. Theoretical and computational decisions about how land, water, and air interact give each model its own relationship to (or regime of) temporality, causality, and reality. Theories of digital media and science fiction, each of which engages with rules of transformation and change over time, can help develop a lexicon for describing these regimes. The talk shows that climate models deliberately create a spacetime of immerselessness, or the refusal of phenomenological engagement. Considering climate models through the lens of science fiction media can shed new light on the idea that planetary phenomena like global climate change are inaccessible to humanistic perspectives. 

Register here to join us on Zoom 

Register here to join us in person (capacity: 25)