As a measure of the dork-status of this blog, I recently started taking two courses on climate change, both of which are available via webcast. You’ll have to email the professors to ask for the syllabi, but they’re very nice about providing them. Both of the courses were taught at UC Berkeley, the first in Geography and the other in ERG.
The first is Nathan Sayre’s 2007 GLOBAL WARMING. He taught a 2009 version of the course with John Chiang, but the earlier course is more ambitious & more detailed. Unfortunately only audio is available.
The second is John Harte’s QUANTITATIVE ASPECTS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS. As you can guess, it doesn’t only only deal with climate change but other things as well. It’s a core intro course for the Energy and Resources Group at Berkeley, Dan Kammen’s department and a key player in much of the policy debate on climate change in the US.
Accounting for Atmosphere 
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July 30, 2009 at 16:59
Caroline McLoughlin
Hi, Jerome.
As I remarked in another context, I think this question of the margin here is a good one and possibly quite generative. You responded, expecting me to point to Guyer (2004.) This is another good guess—her concerns with price and hoped-for profits resonate well here—though it’s not what I was thinking initially. Still, p 25: “In microeconomic theory the margin refers to the ‘next transaction,’ to which the rational calculus is decisively applied. Profit is maximized where marginal costs (the cost of producingin the next unit) equal marginal returns (the income from the next sale). By using margin here, I am endorsing reasoning, purposive behavior, and strategic means-end thinking as appropriate subject matter for anthropology.” She then goes on to discuss ”rational behavior in uncertain times” and the question of margin and periphery as a structural position vis-à-vis Africa, both of which I think are relevant to your project, alongside this question of calculation and future orientation. With her discussions of price especially, one also thinks, of course, of Roitman.
Initally I was thinking in a kind of broadly philosophical mode, of Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, especially “Tympan” and “Ousia and Grammē” (an old favorite and exemplar of the slogan “impenetrability has its rewards,”) though the concept perhaps comes up more usefully in other essays. Patience, as I try to dig back into my early 90s brain. In one respect the margin here is about limits—first and foremost the limits of philosophy as it has been known and practised to that date, but more broadly, the limit of a text and the limit of a sign or mark: he plays on the relation between mark and margin in French, of his term gramme (or gram) and the Greek grammē. Why not, too, the limit of a kind of calculus of knowability? And consider, too, the edges of “atmosphere,” and its definability. Limit and metaphysics seem, and what he describes as the trembling of limits, might well be at the heart of what you want to explore, it doesn’t all seem too obscurantist.
Further, “The Ends of Man” might provoke some thinking on the limits of the human, of human existence as center. At a later date you might consider the rumination on time and enumeration in the section “Gramme and Number.”
I don’t know whether this is something to consider at this stage. These texts may well be a ponderous red herring at the moment.
July 30, 2009 at 20:58
jeromewhitington
Yes, but what was it that evoked Derrida for you? Not to say there no connection, but wondering what the connection was for you…
July 30, 2009 at 21:01
More on Margins « Accounting for Atmosphere
[…] has pushed me a little on my invocation of the term ‘margin’ – see her comment here – by suggesting I try to think through Derrida’s use of the term. In anticipation of […]