Climate Change? The Precarious Ways of Weathering the Ongoing Catastrophes
Manos Tsangaris and Anh-Linh Ngo in conversation with Christoph F. E. Holzhey

Your question already anticipates the key point: the influence of scientific knowledge depends on the cultural climate. “Knowledge is power”, as the saying goes, but knowledge in itself is not a force, nor does it intrinsically possess any. What is does not imply what ought to be. At the same time, this does not mean that knowledge is completely neutral or free of embedded norms. For an insight to produce any outcome, a whole set of conditions must be in place – including norms and goals, will and means. These prerequisites can certainly be understood at a local or individual level. But the moment we ask what counts as scientific knowledge in the first place, the collective, social and cultural dimensions become unavoidable – thus revealing how deeply the sciences are shaped by the social climate in which they operate. Conversely, scientific knowledge does influence the cultural climate, but not in a way that would let it set the terms on its own.

The reasons for this are amazingly diverse, and some of them are more valid than others. One of the better explanations is that the assumption – or rather the demand – that politics should simply follow science is itself problematic. If political action were to follow directly from scientific evidence, it would no longer be truly political. Instead, it would amount to a technocratic mode of action that treats knowledge as if it had straightforward consequences, without reference to the norms and goals, the priorities and preferences whose negotiation is the very task of politics. The fact that economically liberal and fiscally conservative reforms and austerity measures have been presented for decades as the only possible solution – at least since Margaret Thatcher coined the slogan “There is no alternative” – has hardly been conducive to democratic culture.

This is not meant to lend support to right-wing movements that put themselves forward as an alternative by denying scientific evidence, fabricating alternative facts and truths or even cynically affirming climate change and instrumentalising it in the service of an elitist form of white supremacy. Rather, we need to listen to the sciences with their plurality of voices and, together with and alongside them, use critical and creative thinking to open up scope for another world – perhaps a world of many worlds, or at least one that is more just. In the context of the climate crisis, room for manoeuvre may seem vanishingly small. But precisely because it might already be “too late” in many respects, there is no single scientifically correct course that everyone must follow. Instead, we have a multitude of bad options that provoke conflicts – conflicts that should be settled politically rather than through violence. At best, science can assess the consequences, opportunities and risks of different courses of action. But it is not the job of science to specify, to put it somewhat schematically, either that every effort be directed toward preventing a future catastrophe – often imagined as an apocalyptic threat to “all of humanity” and thus, above all, to the well-being of its most privileged representatives – or that the climate catastrophe be viewed rather as an ongoing crisis that has long affected large parts of the world’s population and is thus better addressed by fighting against existing inequalities and supporting ways of life capable of withstanding an adverse climate.

In my work in recent years with multidisciplinary research groups at the ICI Berlin – groups that operate, in the broadest sense, within the cultural sciences – I was repeatedly struck by how sceptical the postdoc groups were of degrowth approaches, even when the overarching theme, especially with regard to environmental questions, was “reduction” and the critique of growth itself was not in dispute. The association with neoliberal austerity measures – which seem invariably to exacerbate local and global inequalities – is evidently too strong. Shortly before the pandemic, when talk of the Anthropocene was everywhere, one cohort felt drawn instead to the more modest-sounding yet surprisingly multifaceted term “weathering” – a term that can denote both passive exposure to the elements and active resistance to them, the ability to survive a crisis. Working on – and with – this concept has proved extraordinarily productive and promising, not least for articulating how many people are already being weathered by the disastrous effects of the climate crisis and its causes, and at the same time find precarious ways for weathering the ongoing catastrophes.

To begin with, I would reiterate that without uncertainty there is, strictly speaking, nothing to decide, and that talk of open futures in the context of climate change strikes me as overly optimistic. What I find particularly interesting here is that probability and certainty, indeterminacy and determinacy, are intertwined in physical theories and models in ways that often appear paradoxical. Alongside quantum mechanics – a theory that treats probabilities as fundamental and inescapable, and whose predictions have been confirmed experimentally with unsurpassed precision – I am also thinking about chaos theory. On the one hand, chaos theory can model extreme uncertainty due to high sensitivity to small changes in initial conditions: the now proverbial butterfly effect, according to which the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can trigger a tornado in Texas. On the other hand, it understands the dynamics of chaotic systems as governed by so-called attractors, toward which the system converges from any starting point and after any disturbance – and which thus allow for a high degree of predictability. Interestingly, chaos theory can be traced back, in part, to Edward Lorenz’s modelling of atmospheric flows, and the butterfly refers both to the unpredictability of the weather and to the form of the attractor, which Lorenz identified with the climate understood as a range of recurrent weather patterns.

Of course, the models I am referring to here are far too simple to be realistic in any strict sense; they have the advantage of revealing the interplay of extreme indeterminacy and high determinacy. With slight modifications, one can also model tipping points – abrupt shifts triggered by small changes in parameters such as temperature, which can push the system toward other attractors that exhibit qualitatively very different behaviour. 

Unlike the freezing or boiling of water, the highly complex Earth system still involves considerable uncertainties about where, when and precisely how tipping points occur – the disruption of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), for example. Given the foreseeable negative consequences of rapid change, which leave ecosystems no time to adapt, one would think that minor uncertainties carry little weight in decision-making. Things become more difficult – and thus political once again – when choices must be made between specific countermeasures, or when the possibility of positive tipping points must also be taken into account.

The fact that knowledge can have so little consequence is, psychologically speaking, an interesting phenomenon. I’m not convinced, however, that this is primarily due to the specific abstraction of climate. There is often no follow-through on knowledge about health risks and addictive potential – even among experts. Ultimately, this involves such existentially significant cultural questions as how we come to terms with our own mortality. To what extent can and should the future – the knowledge of consequences, which are more or less probable, and which we cannot experience until it is (almost) too late – shape our lives in the here and now?

During the pandemic, it became clear that when confronted with a genuinely imminent danger – in the form of overcrowded intensive care units – scientifically recommended restrictions were readily accepted, sometimes even before any regulation was in place, and, at least initially, observed with considerable solidarity. Yet this dynamic seemed to reverse itself once the imminent danger subsided and many sought to make the most of the time until the next wave, even if that meant hastening its arrival. In the context of climate change – whose dynamics are far more sluggish, even if remarkably fast geologically speaking – this behaviour gives little reason for optimism.

More important than communication about the climate or climate change itself is conveying its causes and consequences as well as possible countermeasures and their effects. The sciences also rely on images, narratives and other aesthetic forms – but the arts undoubtedly have a special role to play in opening up new possibilities.

At the same time, they face their own array of challenges – for instance, when the catastrophic events expected as a result of climate change cannot be narrated in a realist novel without fundamentally violating the structural conventions of this modern genre that is geared to the human scale. Such a novel would not be deemed credible, as Amitav Ghosh compellingly argued a decade ago.

The disparity between different scales – which must nonetheless be considered together and brought into relation – remains a central problem. Climate change is unquestionably human-made, but it has also been described as a hyperobject that extends far beyond the spatial and temporal dimensions of human existence. How can an individual relate to this phenomenon of a planetary scale – where consumption has, in a matter of centuries, burned what took millions of years to form – without feeling overwhelmed? How can they assume responsibility for this without imagining themselves as an omnipotent collective subject of the Anthropocene?

There is good reason to resist the temptations of the sublime – and of apocalyptic narratives – and to look instead for other aesthetic forms that can create an awareness of the entanglement of different scales. In addition to scientific models, one starting point might be to observe precisely the concrete impacts of the ongoing climate catastrophe in specific parts of the world and to trace their repercussions in the Global North and its cultural climate.

There is something to be said for both alternatives: there seems to be a cycle of urgency and fatigue, both individually and collectively, and moral pressure is a dubious strategy that encourages defensiveness. But your mention of strong affective forces leads me back to the previous question, because, in reality, I don’t see any shortage of vivid, alarming models and narratives about climate change with the power to generate strong emotions. The problem – which is also one of aesthetic form – is rather that these narratives can be enjoyed, as their prominence in the entertainment industry indicates. At the same time, they can appear so dystopian and inescapable that they have a paralysing effect. In both cases, there is a discrepancy between aesthetic experience and action – and bridging that discrepancy constitutes a particular challenge for art in this context.

Perhaps we should begin by recognising that the urge to control – to dominate natural phenomena – is itself part of the problem. This would bring a measure of relief, not by encouraging inaction but by challenging the fixation on technological solutions, up to and including geoengineering. Responsible action, then, involves recognising mutual dependencies, acknowledging the limits of human power, giving priority to social justice and fostering alternative, more climate-friendly forms of coexistence between human and non-human life.

Translated by Peter Rigney

Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which he has headed since 2006.