Amelia Moore asked me today about why I’m using atmosphere as a figure for the project. Specifically:
“i am healthily skeptical of your use of “atmosphere,” though i do think carbon assets, units made by others, are so fascinating. how is “atmosphere” different or not from “climate” as an object? What figure/form is being produced in these operations you critique? Who speaks of atmosphere in these realms? i like it as a title “accounting for atmosphere” because i like how it sounds, but what are the “real”/”native” terms being made out there? in my work “climate change” is the messy buzzword for the travel market and its consultancies, and “atmosphere” is not at all used. do carbon traders deal in atmosphere? am i making sense at all? its not that important, but i am curious.”
It’s a great question, and I’ve been meaning to be specific about what was really an intuitive decision on my part. So let me try for an answer.
1) It’s figurative – I like its poetic quality, and I feel like an attention to writing as aesthetic and conceptual is justified.
2) Carbon assets/offsets are the commodity – they have a very clear ontology. “Commercial grade carbon” refers to something highly abstract but made real. Yet consider this question – If I decide to stop eating meat and to ride my bike everywhere, what are the long term consequences of this for climate change? The atmosphere is something like a strange machine, full of uncertainty, into which I put my ethics and politics with the expectation that some kind of net change will be manifest in some relatively distant future. So a different, global version of this is how carbon markets might connect to a global regulatory regime.
3) ‘Climate’ may be a substitute term, but I think it’s not quite adequate. I like atmosphere because it’s less common, so there’s less confusion about whose term it is (it’s mine – not a ‘native’ term, who are after all a lot of different people of no particular common sociological group).
4) The ontological question is not exactly a question of discourse, so I’m not sure it’s crucial to trace the genealogy of a term that enters into circulation with particular truth-effects. I’m thinking about an object with inherent uncertainty that’s only necessary to know as an ethical and political problem in the contemporary moment.
5) People do use ‘atmosphere’, some. An activist I interviewed today at EcoEquity told me that ‘there is no atmospheric space left’. In order to make this claim he explained a complex quantification argument (Meinshausen et. al, Nature 458, 1158-1162 30 April 2009) in which was calculated the total volume of of allowable carbon-equivalent emissions between 2000 and 2050 if we are to have a 75% chance to keep the temperature change below 2 degrees C (a benchmark figure for negotiations). That total figure, he said, is 1000 Gigatons, or 1 Teraton. Between 2000-2006, global emissions were about 234 Gt – i.e. ~25% of the ration in just 7 years! So ‘atmosphere’ (atmospheric space) functioned as a metaphor that allowed him to make a claim about how we’d better get our global emissions cap together fast. And it’s not totally a metaphor. The atmosphere has volume, and the greater proportion of CO2 in that volume the greater global warming. (Interestingly, it may be that I’m implicitly positioning myself very close to this group’s work, which in fact has been important to my thinking.)
So ‘climate’ is definitely in the mix, but I want atmosphere to specify this connection between current costly action and future-oriented risk or opportunity. Risk or opportunity is a function of how climatic & market systems behave, which is very tricky to know. Atmosphere is the temporal political problem as a function of what the authors above call “a representative estimate of the distribution of climate system properties.” The atmosphere is an object of knowledge such that it becomes a site of apprehension, anticipation, investment, opportunism, ethical reflection and political evaluation and negotiation…
Accounting for Atmosphere 
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July 10, 2009 at 17:03
Amelia Moore
Thank you for responding to my question. I am mostly satisfied with your answer. I do see the aesthetic merits of “atmosphere” and I like the spatial metaphorics that came out of your interview. These are reasons enough to play with the word. But as an analytic term, which I think is what you are alluding to in your last paragraph, can it really cover these future orientations and market moves that you refer to? can climate? Can you take a pre-existent word, with multiple meanings and referents and turn it into a concept of such specificity? And I can push you more- its easy for me because I don’t have answers to my own questions- to think about other “global markets/resources,” like the ocean? how is the atmosphere a different domain? The ocean is even a carbon sequestering domain. Climate, for all its faults, can refer to this relationship (and with forests and rocks and ice caps, etc etc) or this mechanism if you prefer that metaphor. I still see the ethical and political problem- the thing that has become problematized- as climate. And i like your last sentence, and it will be hard for me not to substitute climate and say the same sort of thing.
July 10, 2009 at 18:26
jeromewhitington
Amelia, thanks again for your comments and for pushing me. I want to leave open some of your points while just saying a couple of things. First, you’re suggesting that ‘atmosphere’ calls attention to air but not to the other relationships at stake. Partly, I see your point. Nicholas Stern wrote recently “The danger from climate change lies not only, or even primarily, in heat. Most of the damage is from water, or the lack of it: storms, droughts, floods, rising sea levels” (The Global Deal p.9). Meanwhile, you call attention to the geophysical relationships between air and water in its different states.
First, carbon regulation will involve specific targets for atmospheric carbon emissions, namely CO2, methane, nitrous oxide and HFCs (primarily). I haven’t gotten into it here yet, but the research project I’m contemplating will focus specifically on carbon regulation and trading. This works through numerical targets for atmospheric concentrations of CO2-equivalent (measured in parts per million); the idea is to quantify and limit the total volume of CO2-e entering the atmosphere, which will be a remarkable achievement.
Second, you mention the ocean. Quantifying atmospheric emissions will be a conceptual and technical feat that makes it possible to talk in practical terms about rights to a managed atmosphere. What’s very specific here is the drive to commodify atmospheric emissions. While atmosphere has on-going ontological dimensions, it is only over the past, say, 15 years that an ontology of atmosphere has begun to take shape as a singular thing – as the sort of thing for which a ton of carbon released in Indonesia can be made equivalent to a ton of carbon emitted in Germany. No one has tried to do this with the ocean. As I understand there are important international agreements in place, but no one tries to control the sum total of any chemical exchange with the oceans.
Finally, perhaps it’s a good time to think about how the term ‘atmosphere’ operates, because I’m not sure it’s a concept in Rabinow’s sense. Rather, I would say that it points to the question or problem-space as laid out in the post. After all, the research hasn’t happened yet! At any rate, it’s not simply aesthetic. Surely it doesn’t attempt to speak to any comprehensive anthropological approach to climate change – it has nothing directly to do, for instance, with probabilities of mass extinctions or large scale climate-induced displacement. So there will definitely by ideas for which “climate” is a much more suitable term, but the opposite I think will be true too.
July 19, 2009 at 13:23
jeromewhitington
My friend Mike sent me in an email this comment:
“On the term atmosphere vs. climate, the clearest argument for the former (I think you make it) is that if you’re interested in carbon finance, it makes sense to talk in terms of atmosphere (rather than climate) because emissions are the building blocks of atmosphere, whereas climate is an effect of atmosphere — so the ontological chain of connection is shorter and more direct to speak in terms of atmosphere. You might also note that atmospheric science/atmospheric scientist is/are still the self-preferred academic/disciplinary terms, even as everyone else starts to call them climate scientists.”
Another way to look at this is that as I formulate a research agenda I’m focusing on the linkages between human activities and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, not on the subsequent links between co2 concentration and e.g. actual climate events, adaptation efforts, etc. In fact this decision is an artifact of the significant amount of work already done on climate change to the extent that the ordering of linkages is a rationality that was created and must be argued for and defended (e.g. Stern 2008 makes a case for it interestingly as part of a justification for a carbon trading mechanism versus a carbon tax).
To the extent there is consensus, it allows work to move forward – perhaps this is an example of what Dewey called ‘social intelligence’. One could also say that series of linkages is part of the political ontology of atmosphere, in the sense that the logic of climate change produces a rational ordering of society, i.e., insofar as a ‘decision’ to take up that ‘ordering’ allows ‘us’ to ‘move forward’ (each of these being important social categories around which genealogies could be built referring no doubt to strains of Enlightenment thought).