Abstract

This paper explores a crucial dilemma behind the failure of climate politics: the “dehumanization” of the concept of climate, i.e., the emergence of a predominance of global perspectives, conceptions, and knowledge of climate, which do not translate into local knowledge, experience, and political action. On the one hand, twentieth-century climate science improved understanding of global climate change tremendously. On the other hand, it focused on reductionist quantification and modeling and emphasis on large spatial and temporal scales. This research direction produced large- and global-scale knowledge and can aptly be described as knowledge from above. Climatology in its original Humboldtian conception, in contrast, focused on detailed local information. The human dimension—the support of human affairs—was at the core of it. This understanding of climatology involved priority of local-scale knowledge and can be regarded a version of knowledge from below, which still predominated in the first half of the twentieth century. In my paper, I will explore the question how the understanding of climate was “dehumanized” by globalizing research approaches and scientific conceptions through the twentieth century. Scientific and political interests pushed a globalizing agenda and produced a conceptual and discursive detachment of climate knowledge from human scales. The paper argues that it is important to understand the historical and ideological foundation of knowledge from above and its epistemic and social authority, if we aim at re-establishing recognition of knowledge from below and the lost links between both types of knowledge.

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