Description:

New media environments have created a “glass laboratory,” exposing climate data, methods, models, and results to unprecedented public scrutiny and challenge. Meanwhile, the political stakes of climate change rise ever higher. This talk examines the history of environmental data systems in the context of the current US administration’s assault on environmental science. Tracking and understanding environmental change requires scientific memory, aka “long data”: consistent, reliable sampling over long periods. Weather observations can become climate data, for example — but only if carefully curated and adjusted to account for changes in instrumentation and data analysis methods. Environmental knowledge institutions therefore depend on an ongoing truce among scientific and political actors. For at least 25 years, climate denialism and deregulatory movements have sought to destabilize this creaky truce, which nevertheless held until recently. Since 2017, however, science deniers and non-scientist ideologues have been appointed to lead key American knowledge institutions. These leaders view certain environmental data systems as targets, which they may yet succeed in crippling or completely dismantling. These developments threaten the continuity of the “long data” vital to tracking climate change and other environmental disruptions, with significant consequences for both domestic and international security. The glass laboratory presents a paradox. It holds the potential to democratize expertise and improve public trust — yet in practice, it has empowered science deniers and sown distrust, with possibly catastrophic consequences for truth.

Paul N. Edwards is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford University and Professor of Information and History at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the history, politics, and culture of information technologies and infrastructures. Edwards’s prize-winning book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), a history of the meteorological information infrastructure, was named a 2010 Book of the Year by The Economist magazine. His book The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996) won honorable mention for the Rachel Carson Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and has been translated into French and Japanese. With Geoffrey C. Bowker, Edwards edits the MIT Press Infrastructures book series. Edwards has held visiting positions at Sciences Po, Paris; Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands; the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa; the University of Melbourne, Australia; and Cornell University. He has been a Carnegie Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Senior Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows. His current research concerns the history and future of knowledge infrastructures, as well as further work on the history of climate science and other large-scale information infrastructures.

Co-presented by the Science in Human Culture Program and the Kaplan Humanities Institute.

The 2017-18 TRUTH Dialogues are a year-long conversation about knowledge crises and politics from humanistic perspectives, co-presented by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities in partnership with multiple Northwestern departments and programs.