Download The geopolitics of climate change

Political Geography 37 (2013) 38e47
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
The geopolitics of climate change
Simon Dalby*,1
Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6C2, Canada
a b s t r a c t
Keywords:
Geopolitics
Climate change
Geometrics
Anthropocene
Security
In his 2012 Political Geography plenary at the 2012 Royal Geographical Society meeting, Stuart Elden
posed the possibilities of a “geopolitics” that engages the earth, the air and volumetric understandings as
an alternative to geopolitics as a synonym for global politics with its two dimensional cartographic
imagination. More is needed than political geography writ large: a material sensibility is necessary to
think about security and geography but one that is not linked to traditional determinist formulations.
Climate change has a long connection to geopolitics, but now humanity is determining the future of the
planetary climate. Picking up Elden’s themes, this paper explores how taking the physicality of climate
change seriously requires a rethinking of politics in the face of numerous transformations in what is
becoming the more obviously artificial planet in the Anthropocene epoch. The geometrics now needed in
security analysis include the volumes of global carbon dioxide and Arctic ice. Geopolitical discourse
needs a fundamental overhaul to deal with the new circumstances and incorporate climate change as a
production problem in the making of a new world, not as a deterministic phenomenon shaping human
life in coming decades.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
“If we really care deeply about the climate and other socio environmental conditions, our theoretical gaze and political
passions have to shift from a concern with the environment per
se to a concern and passion for the construction of a different
politics.” Erik Swyngedouw (2013: 2)
Geopolitics
Geopolitics is a word that invokes many things simultaneously.
Struggles for political dominance is the most obvious meaning of
the term and one that comes with the implicit suggestion that this
is a matter that is to be understood at the global scale. The “geo”
here is both a matter of the world and a matter of the geographical
arrangements the shape the contests for power over that world. It is
about the spaces of politics, the geographies of rule, authority and
frequently violence. It is nearly always about attempts to make,
organize, dominate and control particular spaces, most notably
now the spaces of the global neo-liberal economy (Panitch &
Gindin, 2012).
As a generation of critical geopolitics scholarship has made clear,
geopolitics is also about the modes of knowledge, of ways of
* Tel.: þ1 2267723150.
E-mail address: [email protected].
1
Political Geography Lecture, presented to the Annual Meeting of the Association
of American Geographers, Los Angeles, April 2013.
0962-6298/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.09.004
representing the world that have political consequences (Dodds,
Kuus, & Sharp, 2013). In this sense geopolitics is quite literally
about how the world is made known. The geographical terms in the
scripts used by politicians, the images conjured up by those who
represent foreign places, and their specification in terms of having
attributes requiring certain forms of policy are ubiquitous modern
political practices (Agnew, 2003). These are obviously literary
practices where geopolitical discourse is routine. But more than
textual matters structure the practices of global politics even if the
other forms of knowledge e numerical and computational e discussed below, are rendered back into text in the key practices of
decision-makers and in the justifications used in policy documents,
political speeches and media punditry.
Popular imaginations are shaped by multiple modes of political
discourse, and in the case of climate change in particular, by
numerous invocations of nature, threat and most recently severe
storms and unusual droughts and heat waves in contemporary
media (Boykoff, 2011). How these are known and interpreted
matter in political terms as the huge amounts of money spent by
“conservative” institutions in the United States to cast doubt on the
realities of climate change show very clearly. How science relates to
politics, and how various types of knowledge become politically
useful is unavoidable in all this (Hulme, 2009), as it has long been in
discussions of geopolitics.
The ability to establish a context remains a particularly useful
capability in politics, a practice properly deserving the term
S. Dalby / Political Geography 37 (2013) 38e47
geopolitics. But the context in which climate and geopolitics might
be linked has changed dramatically over the last century in
particular. In no small measure this is due to the rapid expansion of
technical capabilities and the engineering of whole new urban
spaces, production systems, commodity chains as well as the rapid
transformation of “rural” landscapes into zones of agricultural
extraction. The green revolution and the relationships between
weather and crop yields are not unrelated to the calculations of
geopolitics (Perkins, 1999); cold war scholars will remember the
importance of satellite-based estimates of the Soviet harvest. North
Korea watchers do similar calculations today. Drought is, contemporary commentators have suggested, related to the “Arab Spring”
(Mabey, Schultz, Dimsdale, Bergamaschi, & Amal-Lee, 2013). These
technologies are also modes of knowing, charting, measuring and
calculating the earth as it is transformed; this relationship is key to
climate change geopolitics, but while it’s not a new matter, the
recent focus on anthropogenic climate change adds important new
twists to an old story.
Climate has become once again a matter for explicit geopolitical
deliberation, but in very different terms than it was in the previous
manifestations of what have become known as classical geopolitics.
The emergence of climate change as a matter of increasing urgency
in global politics requires us to engage with some of these themes
again it seems (Webersik, 2010). This paper starts there. Subsequent
sections deal with how the atmosphere was a key arena for the cold
war, how climate science is tied into geopolitics through this period
and how contemporary climate fears have become part of security
discourse. The latter half of the paper suggests that both this history
of cold war geopolitics, and the contemporary specifications of
ecological spaces extend Stuart Elden (2013) concerns with volumes and geometrics. The text ends with some reflections on future
trajectories and how climate is changing governance, both
through markets and potentially through geo-engineering projects,
suggesting that old determinist arguments have now been reversed
in the ‘great acceleration’ period in the Anthropocene.
Determinism, climate and geopolitics
Theories that reduce human history to uni-causal mechanisms
are rightly regarded with scholarly suspicion. Much of the early
work of the twentieth century on these themes of environmental
causation and the influence of climate on the course of human
history have been dismissed as being determinist if not racist or
imperialist myopia. The latter point is particularly important, as
Mike Davis (2001) makes so clear in his Late Victorian Holocausts.
There remains a very powerful politics to natural explanations of
social phenomena that allow the rich and powerful to evade their
responsibilities while attributing human suffering to natural causes. Nonetheless to argue that all discussions of climate as a
constraint, if not a cause of human history should be dismissed is to
fly in the face of much research in environmental history that has of
late richly added to the understandings of earlier phases of the
human condition (Hornborg, McNeill, & Martinez-Alier, 2007).
While care has to be taken with dismissals of earlier scholarship,
not least because of the unavoidable oversimplifications of disciplinary history, and the institutional advantages of distancing new
scholarship from the supposedly inferior or tainted practices of the
past, simple arguments that climate causes things were frequently
simply badly off the mark. Preston E. James’ (1972: 376) summary
comment on Ellsworth Huntington’s work will have to suffice in
place of a more detailed exposition here: “Huntington worked on
subjects for which objectively defined data were lacking and in a
period before the methods for collecting such data had been
worked out”. More recent environmental history emphasizes the
complexity of climate and other factors in ways that reinforce
39
James’ evaluation. This is all important because of the popularity of
Malthusian environmental scarcity formulations as the cause of all
sorts of contemporary insecurities (Dalby, 2009). As Christian
Parenti (2011) emphasizes, contemporary climate changes are
impacting on landscapes already restructured profoundly by the
processes of neoliberal agriculture.
Rendering earlier theories in terms of possibilism rather than
determinism is an altogether safer intellectual strategy, not least
because there are environmental constraints on many human activities, only perhaps most obviously such things as particular
modes of agriculture that can be undertaken in what parts of the
world due to rainfall availability and the constraints of nutrient
availability and the numbers of degree days needed for crop
maturation. Likewise disease prevalence is related in some ways to
ecological conditions necessary for vectors to flourish; tropical
diseases are mostly so called for obvious reasons. Indeed it seems
that Jared Diamond’s (1997, 2005) major work in Guns, Germs and
Steel, and Collapse is better understood as sophisticated rearticulations of possibilism, rather than as matters of environmental determinism, not least because of the key point in Collapse
that humanity could now learn its way out of ecological difficulties.
Determinist arguments are nonetheless remarkably persistent
in political discourse, not least because of their overly simplistic
geographies. Attributing causal logics to specific contexts, and in
the process imputing natural explanations on the grounds that
either that’s the way things are ‘there’, or that there are no choices
because of how things are ‘there’, is routine geopolitical discourse.
It has long been key to invoking environmental causation to conflicts (Dalby, 2002). As geographers have been arguing for a long
time these convenient naturalizations of artificial cartographic
convention (Fall, 2010) work well to obscure social and economic
matters that flow across the boundaries demarcated on maps. In
the process the responsibilities that go with those cross boundary
activities are elided in favour of simple specifications of ‘here’ and
‘there’, and usually virtuous proximity and threatening or morally
flawed others elsewhere.
All this is especially dangerous when, as is sometimes the case, it
now feeds into the geopolitical discussions related to contemporary
climate matters. It is dangerous, as the rest of this paper argues,
mostly because it so dramatically misconstrues the nature of
contemporary transformations. This misconstrual can be very
politically useful to those who either wish to proceed on present
trajectories or those who warn of the need for coercive preparations to deal with what is coming. Whatever the merits of earlier
arguments about the climate’s shaping influence on human history
might have been, it is no longer that case that this matters much in
terms of geopolitics. What now matters is the opposite argument.
The rich industrial carbon fuelled part of humanity is now determining the future course of the climate not the other way round!
This is why, according to a growing number of earth system scientists, we now live in the Anthropocene, not the Holocene.
Anthropocene geopolitics
The transformation wrought in the last few generations by
global capitalism, and especially in the period since the middle of
the twentieth century, the period of ‘the great acceleration’ in the
terms of the earth system scientists, now means that it is human
action that is shaping the future of the earth’s climate system
(Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen, & McNeill, 2011). Decisions made by
those who determine what gets made where, and how the terrestrial surface of the planet is used, now matter directly in terms of
the future climate configuration. Climate matters in human affairs
now, particularly in terms of the likely impacts more severe storms
and more extreme weather events will have on unprepared
40
S. Dalby / Political Geography 37 (2013) 38e47
populations in coming decades. These are less and less “natural”
events because carboniferous capitalism is changing the planet
rapidly; the weather is on steroids these days (Trenberth, 2012).
These changes are coming much more rapidly, it needs to be
emphasized, than many of the previous shifts from one geological
epoch to another (Barnosky et al., 2012).
The emergence of this new condition, of life in the Anthropocene, requires us to recognize that the modern assumptions of
nature as separate from humanity, of environment as an external
element, determining or not, of the human condition were never a
very accurate portrayal of life in the biosphere. The argument in
what follows is that these distinctions have to be transcended if we
are to collectively think about the future, and how to shape it, in
effective ways.
While geographers have been looking to the small scale to understand how genetics and biological sciences in particular can be
understood in terms of hybrids and new assemblages of life (Braun,
2007), as a discipline we have been slow to recognize that the
biosphere itself is now, in Latour’s terms, effectively a hybrid of the
artificial and the natural. The environmentalist tropes frequently
used to discuss the iconic ‘blue marble’ NASA image of the whole
earth now need to be supplemented with a much more explicit
recognition that through our production systems humanity is
deciding whether and for how long the ice cap that dominates the
lower part of that image will remain. What we will “compose” in
coming decades matters greatly (Latour, 2011). How we came to
this pass, and how we now know what we do know about our new
condition, this matter of life in the Anthropocene, is intimately
interconnected with geopolitics, both in terms of how cultural
representations of the earth have been generated, and in terms of
how our technical practices have produced and enabled knowledge
of the world in the process of trying to dominate and control it.
Crucially, we also need to look to the emergence of artificial
biomes as the geographical mapping of the planet that sets the
stage for discussions of both mitigation and adaptation measures to
climate change (Ellis, Goldewijk, Siebert, Lightman, & Ramankutty,
2010). The Anthropocene has a geography. Indeed contrasting the
formulations of contemporary cartographic representations with
traditional geographic discussions of natural areas of the world is a
useful corrective to assumptions that humanity is a recent superimposition on a prior “natural world”. It also powerfully undercuts residual claims to determinism by emphasizing that the
geographical contexts that matter to humans are not natural, but, in
terms of species mix in particular, hybrid constructions of artificial
migrations and impositions. These ‘anthromes’ as opposed to biomes, are the mappings that now matter in considering the
appropriate contextualizations for understanding geopolitics in the
twenty first century.
In the previous Political Geography lecture in this series Stuart
Elden (2013) posed questions of securing volume as a geopolitical
practice that, he argued, was a three dimensional view of the
practices that was more appropriate than the largely two dimensional focus on “securing the area” which is a standard policing and
military tactic, as well as the “flat” surface assumed in much international relations thinking. Territoriality, to use Sack’s (1986)
formulation, involves the demarcation of areas, the policing of
boundaries, and the control of who and what enters the “secured
area”, and is a powerful tool in the armoury of power. However,
Elden suggests that it needs a vertical dimension to reflect the
contemporary geometries of power. This is both a matter of vertical
geopolitics in terms of urban landscapes, buildings and structures,
aerial surveillance and controlling “airspace” as well as a matter of
subterranean systems, tunnels and infrastructure. How all this is to
be measured and surveilled is a matter of geometrics in Elden’s
terms.
Picking up these themes this paper suggests both that “volumetric geopolitics” has been an important matter through the cold
war period, both in terms of controlling airspace, and orbital space,
but also in terms of the geophysics of the atmosphere. In Neil
Smith’s (2008) terms, making space is also about making nature.
Controlling this volume in a number of ways, and understanding its
materiality, were important parts of cold war geopolitics, and ones
interlinked with climate. Now, as climate becomes a more high
profile concern for global governance, the crucial measurements of
the earth, its geometrics, are key to geopolitical considerations.
Cold war: geophysics and geopolitics
In his study of the early years of the Cold War Matt Farish (2010)
shows how various scientific and technological practices changed
how power worked in the United States, and how the representations of the world that structured the geopolitical discourses of the
time were shaped by a variety of emergent knowledges only most
obviously nuclear physics, remote sensing and operations research.
These were the decades of the physicist and the behavioural scientist. The cold war was shaped to a very substantial extent by
these knowledges and the genre of nuclear strategy, written by
those whom Australian strategist Peter King so pithily termed the
‘obliterati’, was the pinnacle of technical knowledge linked to a
frequently very crude realpolitik that endangered civilization profoundly. Although it is frequently forgotten, some of the geopolitical specifications of the Russian context and the supposedly
intrinsically expansionist nature of the Soviet Union went back
directly to Ratzel’s environmental determinist writings (Dalby,
1990). The simple binary logics of a world of two superpowers
fed rhetorics of confrontation, a zero-sum world where superpower
rivalry determined the fate of civilization.
Nuclear strategy was in part a very quantitative enterprise, the
measurements of missile throw-weights; kilotons and megatons
of destructive power; the circular error probabilities of missile
accuracy populated the texts and calculations of the ‘Wizards of
Armageddon’ (Kaplan, 1983). Radiation was also a matter of
quantitative measurements, exposure levels and supposedly safe
doses. Where Halford Mackinder had been concerned about the
manpower for great power rivalries, now nuclear weapons, longrange bombers and missile numbers were more important to
the calculations of scenarios of confrontation. Physics and operations research provided the intellectual tools for “the soldiers of
reason” (Abella, 2008). The engineering of bunkers as well as the
drafting of codes and protocols for controlling the weapons were
numerical technical matters. The metrics that sometimes seemed
to matter least were the very crude estimates of the number of
immediate fatalities. As Farish (2010) makes clear, these knowledges were derived from Second World War experiences with
scientific warfare, the practices of logistics and the technical calculations of bombing missions, troop movements and massive
industrial production systems that produced war materiel so
copiously.
The war produced missile technology too, and the resultant
space race in the 1960s pushed intercontinental missile technology
into orbit and then to the moon and further afield. Science, and
initially physics, was key to this and to such things as the International Geophysical Year in the late 1950s where study of the
physical parameters of a globe understood as such (Jones, 1955)
were part of the attempts to know and appropriate the planet,
frequently for military purposes. The post-war sciences of
geophysics and meteorology in the United States included serious
discussions of the possibilities of local weather modification as a
weapon of war (Edwards, 2010). Geophysical research also generated attempts to measure trace gases in the atmosphere, efforts
S. Dalby / Political Geography 37 (2013) 38e47
that eventually resulted in the iconic graph of our times, the Keeling
curve of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
All this geophysics research mattered in part because understanding the physical functions of the atmosphere, the radio properties of the ionosphere, not to mention the dispersal patterns for
radiation from nuclear explosions, or the potential disruptions to
ozone layers or electronic communications from high altitude
weapons detonations, were part of war planning. At least in terms of
radioactive contamination, the partial test ban treaty of the early
1960s was an attempt to reduce atmospheric pollution amid growing
realization of the large scale impacts of a nuclear war (Soroos, 1997).
Concern about changing the planet’s overall climate arose as part of
this investigation of geophysics, and a scientific assessment of
the potential for human alterations of the global climate landed
on President Johnson’s desk in 1965 (Schneider, 1989).
The growing realization about the potential damage of a nuclear
war and the Cuban Missile Crisis led gradually to attempts to
constrain the nuclear arms build up and SALT and ABM treaties. The
physical realities of nuclear war made mutual restraint a necessity
in geopolitical thinking; aggressive war, officially illegal under the
United Nations arrangements, became a practical non-starter in a
geopolitical standoff where deterrence constrained policy makers’
ambitions. Attempts to get round the technical stalemate of assured
destruction by plans for strategic defence initiatives and space
warfare in the 1980s raised further concerns with the fate of “whole
earth security” (Deudney, 1983). Much of this discussion was
encapsulated in terms of ‘global security’ a frequently inchoate
phrase, but at the heart of discussions of cold war geopolitics where
the domain of conflict was the whole world, and the physics of
missiles, trajectories and controlling orbital as well as atmospheric
space was key to the geographical imaginations structuring military plans and policy discussion (Dalby, 2013a).
Rapid onset climate change
By the early 1980s the ecological effects of a nuclear war had
become a major argument for disarmament. In particular the
destruction of the ozone layer was of concern; high altitude nuclear
explosions had made this an issue much earlier. While there were
concerns in the 1970s that air pollution was actually cooling the
planet e sulphate aerosols being a major issue both in cooling and
acid rain e the connection to geopolitics and specifically warfare
came to a head in 1983 when theories of nuclear winter appeared in
print (Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack, & Sagan, 1983). These suggested that hot nuclear wars would quickly turn very cold as clouds
of debris and smoke lofted into the atmosphere would bring on
very rapid onset climate change. In colloquial terms, nuclear winter
arguments suggested that the hell of a post nuclear war world
would quickly freeze over.
Historical analogies with the detonation of Tamboro in 1815 and
Krakatoa in 1883 suggested debris in the upper atmosphere might
provide for at least a year without summer. Agricultural collapse
due to a combination of the destruction of industrial and fuel
supply facilities as well as “nuclear winter” might, the scenarios
suggested, finish off civilization as it had come to be known (Sagan
& Turco, 1990). All of this added greatly to the arguments in the
1980s for the end of cold war. From anarchy and unrestrained superpower competition, the international system was nudged
further towards what Daniel Deudney (2007) calls negarchy, a
matter of bounding power, a necessity where the possibilities of
civilization termination loomed in the shape of mushroom clouds
and subsequently a climate changed to a much cooler temporary
configuration.
This link between concerns of nuclear warfare and climate
change brought the physics of modelling directly into the
41
discussion of climate. While there were doubts over the calculations of severity of nuclear war, which cities had high enough fuel
loading densities to generate firestorms, how many weapons targeted on what would be necessary to trigger full scale nuclear
winter, how long it would last and related questions, what was
clear from then on was that humanity had the ability to drastically
change the earth’s climate. From the physics of cold war, the
knowledge of the ‘numerati’ subsequently morphed into the world
of climate modelling using ever more sophisticated computers, a
world of ‘computati’ at the pinnacle of big science (Edwards, 2010).
The big science of the cold war was of physics and attempts to know
the world to control it in the rivalry of superpowers; its spinoffs
include climate models and the devices now used to monitor earth
systems. It is a metropolitan ‘big science’ view of a world to be
known, monitored and now ‘managed’.
While there is much more to climate science than the investigations of nuclear winter, the discussion of nuclear winter
spurred on the science of climate modelling and by the end of the
1980s it was clear that human actions were causing discernable
climate shifts as James Hansen famously stated in congressional
testimony in the hot summer of 1988 (Schneider, 1989). What
wasn’t clear, and what has generated much ‘big science’ since, is
what the projections of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
will mean for the future configuration of the biosphere. Modelling
climate change became a big project in the 1990s and although
numerous additional models have been added, the details of what
is coming, and when, remain unclear despite huge efforts and the
sequence of IPCC assessment reports since 1990.
The rapid reduction in Arctic Ocean ice cover makes especially
clear that linear extrapolations of trends into the future seem unlikely. In human terms heat waves, floods and drought in Russia,
Pakistan and the US respectively in the last few years have suggested that unpredictability is the new norm. Where nuclear winter
threatened rapid onset climate cooling, the relentless expansion of
carboniferous capitalism is promising climate change as a result of
atmospheric warming. This in turn has raised numerous concerns
about the geopolitical consequences of climate change.
Climate security
After September 11th 2001, the war on terror was the Bush
administration political agenda; attempts to get climate change
onto the security agenda were resisted by the White House. Media
coverage of a scenario exercise on global warming and conflict
(Schwartz & Randall, 2003), that suggested that the Bush administration’s security priorities were misplaced, did generate some
attention. While this document suggested that war might result
from rapid climate change, it was not at all clear how this might
occur; disruptions were simply assumed to lead to conflict. By 2007
the bureaucratic logjam in Washington was overcome and military
analyses suggesting that climate change was an important matter
for geopolitical consideration appeared (Campbell et al., 2007; CNA,
2007; Pumphrey, 2008). The military, concerned to think ahead and
make plans for future eventualities, is taking the changing climate
seriously even if politicians in Washington, many in thrall to fossil
fuel funds and the confusion spread by the climate denial campaigns, are not. In part this is related to the growing realization that
climate change is unlikely to be a matter of gradual change in the
future, and is a matter of more immediate concern with potentially
disruptive non-linear phenomena that likely will need to be dealt
with by the military (Mayer, 2012).
Crucially most of the reports from the American military think
tanks focus on the political instabilities in peripheral areas, and the
possible spillover effects these may have for metropolitan societies.
Environmental shortages ‘there’ may cause disruptions, wars and
42
S. Dalby / Political Geography 37 (2013) 38e47
migration that will cause security concerns ‘here’, we are repeatedly told, despite social science research that suggests such fears
are misplaced (Thiesen, Holtermann, & Buhaug, 2011). This imperial optic is clear in the admittedly preliminary policies for dealing
with environmental security in NATO and OSCE planning documents. Zones of instability on the fringes of Europe are of concern;
possible political instabilities there require interventions to deal
with environmental difficulties now prior to their causing spillover
conflicts later (Moran, 2011). Many of these practical efforts might
make sense regardless of the geopolitical optics, but it is worth
emphasizing that in many of these documents peripheral symptoms get attention rather than the metropolitan causes of climate
change, a geography that is dangerously misleading if tackling
global environmental insecurities is to be taken seriously (Dalby,
2009).
Daniel Deudney (1990) long ago warned that linking environmental change to matters of national security may produce policies
that are counter productive. Viewing climate change through the
lenses of specifically U.S. national security suggests that he had very
good reason to be worried. There are important exceptions to this
generalization, some of which are discussed below, but frequently
there is an imperial framework here in the specification of peripheral dangers to a metropolitan civilization, one that is worrisome indeed for anyone concerned to think about security beyond
the maintenance of the geopolitical status quo that has caused the
problem in the first place. Three geopolitical points are especially
important concerning the emerging discourse of climate security.
First is the argument made in Harald Welzer’s (2012) discussion
of Climate Wars concerning the taken for granted contextualizations of politics. If, he argues, the world is understood as a violent
place, with environmental disruptions simply the way things are,
then war, and military actions to deal with migrations, famines, and
threats to European prosperity may become the geopolitical contextualization that renders violence routine. His analogies with
how Nazi power was consolidated in the 1930s by gradually
changing laws to establish new normalities suggests that geopolitical discourses that render peripheral places as inevitably sources
of conflict, as the new geographical normality, the backdrop for
metropolitan action, are insidiously emerging in a similar fashion.
Second, and following from this is the related point drawn from
the literature in political ecology and trenchantly restated by
Christian Parenti (2011). He reminds readers that the landscapes in
those supposedly peripheral spaces have been remade by practices
of colonization over the last few centuries. They are being remade
once again now by the neo-liberal agricultural political economies
that further displace rural societies. That these are under pressure
from droughts, heat-waves and increasingly unpredictable rainfall
patterns is not in doubt, but the important point is that adaptation
to these events is frequently constrained by the impact that
expanding commercial agriculture is having on rural property
markets, infrastructure and subsistence systems. Migration to the
cities and further afield is not unexpected in these circumstances.
But attributing these processes to natural causes is to misconstrue
the forces in play in a re-run of classical imperial tropes where the
consequences of colonization are written out of the script.
Third, is the related point that people set in motion by environmental change and the lack of adaptive measures available due
to the transformation of rural political economies may well be
portrayed as threats once they show up at the borders of metropolitan states. How these people are understood, and hence
allowed entry or refused admittance matters greatly in terms of
their human security (Mountz, 2010). The war on terror facilitated
the expansion of “security” mechanisms that use police measures,
incarceration, camps, and “refugee housing” as modes of population control, a frequently violent biopolitics that effectively
criminalizes migrants. In so far as those migrants are set in motion
by climate change caused by the fossil fuel consumption of those
societies that subsequently incarcerate those in motion, the politics
of “security” become particularly hypocritical.
While this is the geopolitical optic in much of the conventional
environmental security literature, there remains the nightmare
scenario that climate disruptions might lead to major interstate
warfare. This was suggested rather vaguely in the 2003 Swartz and
Randall scenario and is taken seriously in Matthew Glass’s (2009)
fairly implausible fictional confrontation between China and the
United States in his novel Ultimatum. If major climate change disruptions challenge the stability of states the possibility of major
warfare looms once again on the geopolitical horizon. Gwynne
Dyer’s (2008) journalistic discussion of climate wars spells out
some possible scenarios in detail, making the point emphatically
that none of this needs to happen if climate change is understood as
an issue that needs attention, and given its trans-boundary consequences, one that requires international cooperation and
advance planning to prepare for likely contingencies. Failure to do
so, and the invocation of national security in the face of disruptions,
might indeed lead to warfare. In a chilling scenario Dyer (2008)
suggests how a possible nuclear war between India and Pakistan
might happen if disputes over water resources are not anticipated
and the logic of military confrontation is invoked in a crisis.
Some recent work looking again at nuclear winter scenarios
suggests that even such a fairly small-scale nuclear war might
induce a ‘winter’ (Robock & Toon, 2010). The irony of a warming
world causing a nuclear winter is considerable, but a nuclear winter
will not solve the problem of climate change; cooling would be at
best temporary due to the short duration of dust and smoke in the
atmosphere in comparison to the long residence times of carbon
dioxide.
Climate geometrics
Nearly simultaneous with Elden’s positing the importance of
securing the volume in his Edinburgh IBG lecture in July 2012,
prominent climate activist Bill McKibben published an article in
Rolling Stone magazine that suggested that the most important
geometrics of our time relate to basic aspects of the climate system.
Reflecting on the dangerous new math of climate change he
emphasized three numbers that mattered most in thinking about
climate change. First is 2 , Celsius that is, the widely agreed temperature increase that climate activists and some scientists argue
cannot be exceeded if the planetary system is to remain in more or
less the configuration that humanity has known for the last ten
thousand years.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) commits all parties to the prevention of dangerous
anthropogenic interference with the climate system. The original
agreement did not however specify how much climate change
might be considered dangerous. A consensus grew in the mid 1990s
that 2 C average global warming above pre-industrial levels was
the upper limit of what should be considered. The figure was
widely accepted as the benchmark at the Copenhagen climate
conference in late 2009. There was no obvious scientific origin to
this figure; it emerged as a European Union compromise figure in
the mid 1990s climate change negotiating sessions but nonetheless
it has become the “guardrail” beyond which climate change negotiators are agreed humanity must not go. It is a political number,
not a serious scientific calculation.
McKibben’s (2012) second metric is the matter of the number of
gigatons of carbon dioxide that can be safely emitted to ensure that
the planet does not exceed this supposedly reasonably safe level of
2 of warming. According to the calculations he cites, humanity can
S. Dalby / Political Geography 37 (2013) 38e47
emit another 656 gigatons of carbon (on top of what it has already
burnt) and still stay within the 2 C range. But the third geo-metric,
the one that truly worries McKibben, is the reserves of fossil fuels
already in the inventory of energy production companies. That
number stands at 2795 gigatons according to his sources. The implications are very simple; if all these current reserves are burned
the planet will blow right past the 656-gigaton limit and dramatic
climate change is assured (See Anderson & Bows, 2011). It is
noteworthy that McKibben’s source here is Carbon Trackers, an
entity that combines data from environmentalists and from the
financial industry, and who warned in 2012 that climate change
was a serious danger to investment portfolios. It would become
even more so if all those reserves of fuel are extracted and used in
coming decades.
McKibben (2012) did not include the most widespread metric
from the climate debate, the measurement of parts per million of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The Keeling curve, the measurement of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, has
become an iconic symbol of our age. In May it registered the first
average day of greater than 400 ppmv CO2 in the atmosphere. The
contested history of this measurement, and the battles to maintain
funding for the Mauna Loa measuring station following its initial
establishment during the International Geophysical Year, only
emphasize how scientific knowledge is part of the larger cold war
geopolitical assemblage. Bill McKibben’s campaigning organization
is called 350.org to emphasize the need to reduce CO2 levels to
something close to 350 ppmv to ensure that the climate system
remains in a state loosely similar to the Holocene conditions that
gave rise to human civilization. These geometrics are key to the
climate change discussion, and to the political strategies advocating
a change of course to leave those fossil fuels in the ground.
How to represent this volume of carbon dioxide and visualize
just how much gas is involved is not easy, a matter that has a long
history in human attempts to understand air (Adey, 2014). The
difficulty with carbon dioxide is that while it is ubiquitous e we
exhale it all the time e it is odourless and invisible and a matter for
technical measurement, not a sensuous matter of direct human
experience. As with the earlier case of stratospheric ozone depletion, another matter of invisible gases requiring technical definitions beyond human senses, the politics of these measurements
require a reliance on technical scientific practices that further
imbricate technical matters with political ones (Litfin, 1994).
Another geometric that is a matter of volume is the rising ocean
levels as a result of warming waters. While this too is not without
measurement difficulties given both matters of isostatic adjustments of land and the uncertainties concerning data sets collected
in coastal locations, clearly the volume of the oceans is growing
enough to be highly noticeable in low lying areas, especially in the
case of island states facing inundation (Uan, 2013). Beyond that,
another crucial measure of oceanic change that is of concern is the
changing pH measure of seawater. As carbon dioxide is absorbed
the resultant rise in pH is a very worrisome matter for life in the
oceans. This too is a geometric that matters in charting the new
geophysical circumstances humanity is making. Likewise ocean
temperature rises, and current changes too.
Shrinking ocean ice cover in the Arctic in particular has gained
attention in terms of geopolitics. The volume of ice has shrunk
dramatically in the last few decades as the summers of 2007 and
2012 showed very clearly. This too is a volumetric measurement
that matters in terms of the geopolitical transformation of the
colder parts of the planet (Dodds, 2008). The imminent disappearance of summer ice in the Arctic suggests that one other major
geophysical phenomenon that has been part of the earth system for
millions of years may shortly be a thing of the past. Current trajectories suggest that the planet is heading for one permanent polar
43
ice cap, not two. The ocean ice cover over the North Pole has been
rapidly retreating in recent years. (Greenland is well south of the
pole, it may indeed melt in coming centuries with all the volumetric consequences for rising sea levels and enhanced storm activities (Hansen, 2009).) While there are many unknowns
concerning rates of melting, including whether the albedo change
due to loss of ice cover has already set a positive feedback process in
motion or not, clearly this too is an important geometric that is tied
directly into political discussions of the future configuration of the
planet.
Elden’s (2013) formulation of volume, while a very useful
corrective to the frequently two-dimensional representations of
global politics in cartographic terms, needs to be extended to deal
with climate. Climate geopolitics requires an historical retrospective to consider the importance of the atmosphere and outer space
in the cold war and an extension to grapple more directly with the
materialities of the volumes that are to be secured. The climate
discussion now emphasizes the importance of atmospheric as well
as hydrospheric volumes. Neil Smith’s (2008) crucial argument that
capitalism simultaneously produces nature and space provides the
necessary link; the materialities of spaces matter, not just the volume. Securing the volume in climate discussions might well be read
as securing an upper limit to the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere;
how to do it is now key to contemporary geopolitics, and it works
its way through numerous geographical specifications of reality as
well as the contemporary political economy of financialisation and
securitization in both the monetary and political senses.
Neoliberal geometrics
These measurements are not quite what Elden (2013) had in
mind in his discussion of geometrics and the necessity of securing
the volume. However the logic of his argument fits into the new
mathematics of global security, and the market logics of carbon
measurement now rapidly populating the growing financial industry buying and selling carbon credits, and evaluating, calibrating and certifying ecosystem services in many parts of the world
(Newell & Paterson, 2010). Entirely consistent with Smith’s (2008)
point about the production of nature and space, these geometric
measurements are now calling all sorts of new ecological entities
into existence as matters for geopolitical calculation.
As Lansing’s (2010) examination of this in the case of carbon
sinks in Costa Rica makes clear, these calculations are not always
easy, not least because of the difficulty of specifying exactly where
the forests that count in the calculations actually are. Complicated
geo-referenced polygons are key to the allocation of appropriate
credit for carbon sink services. The new geometries of sinks may
not coincide with prior administrative areas either, all of which
generates complicated new modes of governance and requirements that technical procedures for certifying that ecosystem
services are actually doing what they supposedly should under the
financial arrangements of the clean development mechanism.
In some senses these are new; carbon sinks per se are unprecedented. What is not so new are some of the practices involved in
establishing and managing the new ecological entities (Lohmann,
2006). Forestry plantations are an old mode of colonial resource
management. If they are now to sink carbon rather than produce
fibre or fruit, there may be little practical difference as far as local
populations of forest dwellers are concerned. The reduction of
forests to sinks and the payments to national governments may
have little to do with the indigenous populations outside the formal
calculations of financial payments. The poor, often the most
vulnerable to both climate variability and their inability to resist the
encroachment of modern managerial schemes on traditional subsistence territories, frequently do not enter into these global
44
S. Dalby / Political Geography 37 (2013) 38e47
calculations of carbon trading and the logics of global agricultural
change at all (Cupples, 2012). These highly technical evaluations of
resources are now also part of the global calculations of geopolitics
related to climate change in so far as states make arguments about
their relative importance as sinks in the global carbon economy.
More than this, the complicated geographies of carbon sinks
suggest that these practices are linking metropolitan and peripheral areas in complicated ways that in Saskia Sassen’s (2013) terms
disassemble the territorial state. If adaptive measures for metropolitan powers involve changing the rural economies at great distances, then the globalization of adaptation is also part of the new
geopolitical calculus of climate. This is not just a matter of carbon
sinks, but also of securing land for food production in the face of
growing concerns about food insecurity. While care needs to be
taken in simplistically blaming Northern elites for the process, and
property market bubbles have perverse local effects, nonetheless it
is important to note that climate adaptation measures may themselves cause disruptions and conflict as well as further insecurities.
This is not just a North e South issue either as the 2013 accounts of
Ethiopian people dispossessed of their land by Indian investors
makes very clear (Vidal, 2013). But this point emphasizes the rise in
the power of urban elites, the reassertion of financial power, and
hence in David Harvey’s (2005) terms it is important to emphasize
the class power of the neo-liberal project, one that now largely
controls how the climate crisis will be addressed.
The vulnerabilities of states and economies to storms and
extreme events likewise factor into the new financial arrangements
for managing a climate-changed world. Kevin Grove’s (2010) investigations of Caribbean vulnerabilities and the financialisation of
risk management in schemes for catastrophe bonds show that
while central government and financial institutions may find some
protection, or rather the potential to rebuild after a hurricane, the
poorer and marginal peoples in these societies are excluded from
the calculations of human security. Once again, as Roberts (2010)
emphasizes, the most vulnerable are too poor to factor into the
market logics of neoliberalism, logics that simply ignore epidemiological measurements in particular. That said the larger literature
on human security and climate change has been using precisely
these epidemiological statistics to emphasize the dangers presented by more extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels
(Scheffran, Brzoska, Brauch, Link, & Schilling, 2012), to little practical effect it seems, given the financial metrics used in many policy
responses.
In discussing the various phases of carbon democracy, the political ecology of coal and oil and the possibilities that these opened
up for extending political rights in the case of coal, and frequently
restricting them in the case of petroleum, Timothy Mitchell (2011)
posits first the economy, and then subsequently the market as the
overarching entities that required governance. The gradual ascendance of the market over the economy parallels the rise of globalization, or in earth system terms, the period of the great
acceleration, powered by the rise of petroleum fuels. The rapidity of
international action in the face of the global economic crisis of
2008, in comparison to the manifest failure to grapple seriously
with climate matters, suggests that the market remains key.
While it is premature to suggest that climate is yet anywhere
close to the most important entity for governance, the seriousness
of what is coming implies that climate might become the next
overarching principle. The rapid rise of carbon markets and the
commodification of hot air in the form of carbon credits, offsets and
increasingly complicated derivative style financial instruments
suggests such a shift may be beginning. The planet is now not only a
matter for measurement as an object to be known through the
practices of remote sensing, but much more obviously now a matter
of calculation and computation wherein ecological phenomena are
divided up, surveyed, demarcated and marketed, bought and sold
in the complicated computations of carbon markets. Given the
disruptions of the financial crisis of 2008, and the simultaneous
changes wrought by climate change, the more vulnerable are so as a
matter of ‘double exposure’ in Leichenko and O’Brien (2008) terms.
But it remains to be seen if these innovations in market rules will
curtail, much less reduce, carbon dioxide concentrations in the
atmosphere in coming decades.
Geoengineering
If they don’t, and disasters increase, food supplies become
constrained and political conflict results, the next thing on the
geopolitical agenda is clearly geoengineering (Royal Society, 2009).
While cloud seeding and other weather modification measures are
being experimented with to deal with small-scale meteorological
manipulations, the larger question of adjusting climate on either
regional or global scales is being discussed with increasing urgency
(Humphreys, 2011). Solar radiation management, controlling the
amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface is but an extension
of earlier engineering concerns with managing the atmosphere and
securing airspace from unwanted interlopers, is it not?!
Among the numerous technical possibilities are injections of
sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to effectively shade
the planet (Vaughan & Lenton, 2011). While aerosol pollution of
this nature at lower altitudes has been curbed, largely to deal with
acid rain problems, the possibilities of mimicking volcanic action
are within the bounds of existing technologies; high flying planes
could do the job on a budget that is feasible; stratospheric balloons
could in theory disperse aerosols too, although the British SPICE
project, a small scale test of such theories, was abandoned in 2012
amidst controversy concerning relevant patents and in the face of
environmentalist opposition (Cressy, 2012).
While such solar radiation management technologies might
temporarily reduce insolation, they do not deal with the larger
problem of accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon
dioxide reduction mechanisms are urgently needed, but most of
the existing proposals work too slowly to deal with the looming
crisis. In the face of growing disasters, including the disruption of
weather patterns that cause food insecurities for a major state or
group of states, it seems likely that the temptations to try geoengineering in the face of a global emergency will be very considerable. It is once again a matter of engineering and security; the
discussion of global security has moved on from concerns about
disrupting atmospheric matters in terms of ozone holes and nuclear winters to thinking about how some similar techniques might
now be used to deliberately manipulate the climate.
Given the interest being shown in such things by billionaire
entrepreneurs it may be a Hobson’s choice as to whether it is better
to have militaries or private sector actors doing these things. In
either case it seems essential to have transparency and public
oversight, but as yet there is no regulatory agency in existence that
might begin to think about who should adjust the temperature of
the planet, how and where. Doing so in ways that do not foreclose
“softer”, smaller scale ecological innovations is going to be important (Olson, 2012), especially so as to allow rural peoples the flexibilities to try innovative adaptations that will buffer ecosystems
against meteorological extremes while sinking carbon in ways that
facilitate local livelihood security.
Unpalatable though such considerations may be they are the
next stage of geopolitics and as such deserve critical attention from
geographers. But such a discussion raises impossible questions of
geometrics. How hot should it get? Who decides? Should the planet
have two ice covered poles, or only one? Is 350 ppm of CO2 the goal,
in which case what kind of land use planning is needed to sink large
S. Dalby / Political Geography 37 (2013) 38e47
quantities of carbon? If not on land then why not seed the oceans to
facilitate plankton blooms and carbon uptake there. Never mind
the unknowable ecological effects this might have. Who should
decide how much plankton is needed? Such questions now go on
endlessly, all tied into the new geometrics of planetary system
stability. These are the political questions for our time, but how to
engage them is a fraught matter that the political left has frequently
been slow to address (Klein, 2011).
As Erik Swyngedouw (2010) warns, putting climate change into
the terms of security and engineering can easily lead to a postpolitical populism wherein technical measures are decided by
some political agency without any kind of serious political discussion. Technical discussions of various geo-metrics can all too easily
slip into the constitution of CO2 as a Latourian quasi object that we
are at war against. ‘We’ implies universality and an agent beyond
political contestation with a dangerous fetishization of carbon if
security narratives come to dominate discussion and technical solutions are all that is on offer. Obviously the political order that gave
rise to the problem isn’t in question, merely what technical fix is
most appropriate. One can practically see the engineering companies lining up for the contracts! What is clear is that carbon has
become big business in addition to becoming a matter of security
thinking.
In the absence of a sudden appearance of political sanity and the
implementation of programs, such as James Hansen’s (2009) fee
and dividend scheme for the United States to rapidly change matters away from fossil fuels, how climate change is governed is likely
to be a combination of both security and financial calculations of
‘ecosystem’ services, offsets, and related matters in a series of new
productions of nature. Facing the possibility of crossing tipping
points into a period of abrupt change, the prospect of unilateral
attempts at geoengineering loom. Conflict over competing
schemes, accusations that one state’s geoengineering is worsening
agricultural conditions in another, and disagreements over what
level of temperature is appropriate, are easy to project (Urpelainen,
2012). If these happen in times of political nationalism and the
temptations to unilateral action prove irresistible to politicians then
all bets are off. The atmosphere then becomes not only a volume to
be secured, but also one to be competed for directly. Climate wars
indeed! The early cold war research on local weather modification
as a method of war may end up being tragically prophetic.
Such considerations emphasize the importance of Deudney’s
(2007) notions of negarchy and self-restraint as a model for a
future geopolitics. So far much of the negotiation activity related to
climate change has been in the mode of competitive inter-state
rivalries with states thinking in terms of attempting to dominate
a divided world in a series of zero-sum games. Hence bargaining
strategies presuppose a competitive situation where emissions
reductions are understood as a cost, and relative losses seen as a
problem rather than there being a common interest in reducing
carbon emissions rapidly. The standard realist assumption that
economic progress leads to more power in the international system, and that power is the key to peace and prosperity, is now
hopelessly ill fitted to shaping the future of the Anthropocene
(Dalby, 2013b).
But despite all the attempts on the part of climate change science to explain these simple facts, the political process continues to
replicate the state practices of the past while sporadically, but
increasingly, supporting the innovative climate market mechanisms despite the obvious consequences for ‘development’ that
may be anything but sustainable for local peoples in the ‘South’.
Nonetheless this shift in geopolitical vision, coupled with such
things as the disassembly of national spaces that Sassen (2013)
implies is a crucial part of climate governance, is what we have to
work with now.
45
The territories that are being disassembled, bought, measured,
decided about, and reshaped by new technical practices are the
anthromes made by agriculture, urbanization and deforestation
(Ellis et al., 2010). They are now increasingly artificial entities, and it
is these entities that now matter in the calculus of power and the
designs of new living arrangements in the next phase of the
Anthropocene, when the earth system scholars hope humanity will
try to make a sustainable system for all our species. To do so is going
to require above all a recognition that the old geopolitical premises
inherited from modernity are no longer useful, not least because in
the new artificial circumstances of the Anthropocene climate
change is much more obviously a production problem than it is one
understood in traditional environmental terms.
Conclusion
The Anthropocene means that the deterministic arguments
about climate shaping human destiny are no longer relevant to the
geopolitics of the twenty first century.
While state boundaries may be relatively fixed, the landscapes
within and across them are not. Focussing on the Anthropocene
emphases the point that colonial, or at least metropolitan views of
the world, are not enough to understand the geopolitics of climate.
The long-standing assumptions that global politics is necessarily a
competitive arrangement of “flat” territorial states has, as Elden
(2013) argued, failed to grapple with some of the most important
volumetric dimensions of state power. Extending that argument to
suggest that the volumes that matter most now are some of the key
geometrics related to the atmosphere and the ocean, and the
struggles to secure them are the next phase of geopolitics, also
emphasizes both the continuity of climate as a matter in geopolitical thinking and the importance of taking seriously the reversal
of the assumed relationship between climate and humanity in the
most recent stage of the Anthropocene.
The literature on world order and United Nations reform is littered with good ideas based on notions of a universal humanity and
calls for equality and justice for all. Since at least the 1972 Stockholm conference on the Human Environment, there has been
awareness that we only have one earth, to borrow the title from
Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos’s (1972) conference report. The long
forgotten Earth Charter and Agenda 21 schemes from the 1992
Earth Summit sketched out cooperative arrangements based on a
recognition that humanity ought to operate on the assumption that
there is only one planet, and how we use it matters in terms of the
future prospects for humanity as well as other life forms. Now the
climate science modellers and the formulation of the Anthropocene
have confirmed what appeared obvious to environmentalists of
earlier eras; the interconnections between humanity and planet are
unavoidable and as such the rich industrial portion of humanity has
taken the fate of the earth into its own hands, and in the process has
unleashed a transformation unprecedented in the history of the
planet.
Given this new recognition of the urgency of tackling the
changes set in motion if some semblance of the ecological circumstances that gave rise to humanity is to be maintained for
future generations, the political and academic question for geopoliticians is how a rapid transition from the patterns of present
negotiations, and the assumptions of relative gains problems, not to
mention the basic assumption that the neo-liberal market order of
the present is most important, can be changed. New thinking and a
new politics are indeed needed to challenge the competitive assumptions of state negotiations. The extension of market logics into
carbon credits, and the logics of offsets does not effectively tackle
the root causes of climate change in terms of carboniferous capitalism. While these logics may operate to ameliorate some of the
46
S. Dalby / Political Geography 37 (2013) 38e47
symptoms of climate change, they have so far failed to tackle
climate change in terms of a production problem. Given the
ecological limits of “sinks”, the rapid extension of such markets
will, it seems, inevitably lead to the construction of new geoengineering products and governance mechanisms for what is an
increasingly artificial biosphere.
This requires a clear understanding of the Anthropocene as the
context that now matters most. Flat geopolitics isn’t the appropriate
contextualization; sovereignty in ecological terms is irrelevant to the
problems at hand (Smith, 2009). How to facilitate rapid social change
is a key task for social scientists and not only geographers
(Vinthagen, 2013). This geopolitical contextualization means that
competitive state rivalries in a flat world is the problem to be tackled,
not the given implicit context for the human drama. The geo-metrics
that now matter are volumetric ones concerning sea levels and Arctic
ice, carbon dioxide concentrations and degrees of warming, not the
flat two dimensional boundary demarcations of states.
Climate change adds great urgency to the task of changing the
current implicit contextualizations in geopolitical discourse that
structure how the world is made known to its political subjects, and
hence how those subjects might act politically. The formulation of
the Anthropocene is part of this puzzle, not least because it makes
clear that climate change is a production problem, not an environmental one. Humanity is literally making its future, not protecting a given context. The task now for social scientists, not least
geographers, is nothing less than trying to work out how to shift
politicians and policy makers from a focus on trying to dominate a
divided world to learning how to share a crowded one.
References
Abella, A. (2008). Soldiers of reason: The RAND corporation and the rise of American
empire. Orlando: Harcourt.
Adey, P. (2013). Air. London: Reaktion.
Agnew, J. (2003). Geopolitics: Revisioning global politics. London: Routledge.
Anderson, K., & Bows, A. (2011). Beyond dangerous climate change: emission scenarios
for a new world. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A., 369, 20e44.
Barnosky, A. D., Hadly, E. A., Bascompte, J., Berlow, E. L., Brown, J. H., Fortelius, M.,
et al. (7 June 2012). Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere. Nature, 486,
52e58.
Boykoff, M. (2011). Who speaks for the climate? Making sense of media reporting on
climate change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Braun, B. (2007). Biopolitics and the molecularisation of life. Cultural Geographies,
14(1), 6e28.
Campbell, K. M., et al. (2007). The age of consequences: The foreign policy and national
security implications of global climate change. Washington: Center for Strategic
and International Studies and Center for a New American Security.
CNA Corporation. (2007). National security and the threat of climate change. Alexandria, VA: CNA Corporation.
Cressy, D. (2012). Geoengineering experiment cancelled amid patent row. Nature, 15
May.
Cupples, J. (2012). Wild globalization: the biopolitics of climate change and global
capitalism on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast. Antipode, 44(1), 10e30.
Dalby, S. (1990). Creating the second cold war: The discourse of politics. London:
Pinter.
Dalby, S. (2002). Environmental security. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dalby, S. (2009). Security and environmental change. Cambridge: Polity.
Dalby, S. (2013a). Global environmental security. In R. Falkner (Ed.), The handbook of
global climate and environment policy (pp. 163e178). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Dalby, S. (2013b). Realism and geopolitics. In K. Dodds, M. Kuus, & J. Sharp (Eds.),
The Ashgate research companion to critical geopolitics (pp. 33e47). Farnham:
Ashgate Publishers.
Davis, M. (2001). Late Victorian holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the
third world. London: Verso.
Deudney, D. (1983). Whole earth security: A geopolitics of peace. Washington: World
Watch Institute.
Deudney, D. (1990). The case against linking environmental degradation and national security. Millennium, 19, 461e476.
Deudney, D. (2007). Bounding power: Republican security theory from the Polis to the
global village. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs and steel. New York: Norton.
Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York:
Viking.
Dodds, K. (2008). Icy geopolitics. Society and Space, 26, 1e8.
Dodds, K., Kuus, M., & Sharp, J. (Eds.). (2013). The Ashgate research companion to
critical geopolitics. Farnham: Ashgate.
Dyer, G. (2008). Climate wars. Toronto: Random House.
Edwards, P. N. (2010). A vast machine: Computer models, climate data, and the politics
of global warming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Elden, S. (2013). Secure the volume: vertical geopolitics and the depth of power.
Political Geography, 34, 35e51.
Ellis, E., Goldewijk, K. K., Siebert, S., Lightman, D., & Ramankutty, N. (2010).
Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700 to 2000. Global Ecology and
Biogeography, 19, 589e606.
Fall, J. J. (2010). Artificial states? On the enduring geographical myth of natural
borders. Political Geography, 29, 140e147.
Farish, M. (2010). The contours of America’s cold war. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Glass, M. (2009). Ultimatum. Toronto: Harper Collins.
Grove, K. (2010). Insuring “our common future”? Dangerous climate change and the
biopolitics of environmental security. Geopolitics, 15(3), 536e563.
Hansen, J. (2009). Storms of my grandchildren. New York: Bloomsbury.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hornborg, A., McNeill, J. R., & Martinez-Alier, J. (Eds.). (2007). Rethinking environmental history: World system and global environmental change. Lanham, MD:
Altamira.
Hulme, M. (2009). Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy,
inaction and opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Humphreys, D. (2011). Smoke and mirrors: some reflections on the science and
politics of geoengineering. Journal of Environment and Development, 20(2),
99e120.
James, P. E. (1972). All possible worlds: A history of geographical ideas. Indianapolis:
Bobbs Merrill.
Jones, S. B. (1955). Global strategic views. Geographical Review, 45(4), 492e508.
Kaplan, F. (1983). The wizards of Armageddon. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Klein, N. (28 November 2011). Capitalism vs. the climate. The Nation. http://www.
thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate Accessed 17.05.13.
Lansing, D. M. (2010). Carbon’s calculatory spaces: the emergence of carbon offsets
in Costa Rica. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 710e725.
Latour, B. (November 2011). Waiting for Gaia: Composing the common world through
arts and politics. London: Lecture at the French Institute.
Leichenko, R., & O’Brien, K. (2008). Environmental change and globalization: Double
exposures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Litfin, K. (1994). Ozone discourses: Science and politics in environmental cooperation.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Lohmann, L. (2006). Carbon trading: a critical conversation on climate change,
privatisation and power. Development Dialogue, 48.
Mabey, N., Schultz, S., Dimsdale, T., Bergamaschi, L., & Amal-Lee, A. (2013). Underpinning the MENA democratic transition: delivering climate, energy and resource
security. London: E3G.
Mayer, M. (2012). Chaotic climate change and security. International Political Sociology, 6, 165e185.
McKibben, B. (19 July 2012). Global warming’s terrible new math rolling stone. http://
www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math20120719 Accessed 17.05.13.
Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon democracy: Political power in the age of oil. London: Verso.
Moran, D. (Ed.). (2011). Climate change and national security: A country level analysis.
Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Mountz, A. (2010). In search of asylum. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Newell, P., & Paterson, M. (2010). Climate capitalism: Global warming and the
transformation of the global economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Olson, R. (2012). Soft geoengineering: a gentler approach to addressing climate
change. Environment, 54(5), 29e39.
Panitch, L., & Gindin, S. (2012). The making of global capitalism: The political economy
of American empire. London: Verso.
Parenti, C. (2011). Tropic of chaos: Climate change and the new geography of violence.
New York: Nation Books.
Perkins, J. H. (1999). Geopolitics and the green revolution: Wheat, genes and the cold
war. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pumphrey, C. (Ed.). (2008). Global climate change: National security implications.
Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute.
Roberts, D. (2010). Global governance and biopolitics. London: Zed.
Robock, A., & Toon, O. B. (2010). Local nuclear war, global suffering. Scientific
American, 302(1), 74e81.
Royal Society. (2009). Geoengineering, science, governance and uncertainty. London:
Royal Society.
Sack, R. D. (1986). Human territoriality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sagan, C., & Turco, R. (1990). A path where no man thought: Nuclear winter and the
end of the arms race. New York: Random House.
Sassen, S. (2013). Land grabs today: feeding the disassembling of national territory.
Globalizations, 10(1), 25e46.
Scheffran, J., Brzoska, Brauch, H. G., Link, P. M., & Schilling, J. (Eds.). (2012). Climate
change, human security and violent conflict: Challenges for societal stability. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Schneider, S. (1989). Global warming: Are we entering the greenhouse century? San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
S. Dalby / Political Geography 37 (2013) 38e47
Schwartz, P., & Randall, D. (2003). An abrupt climate change scenario and its implications for United States National Security. GBN. http://www.gbn.com/articles/
pdfs/Abrupt%20Climate%20Change%20February%202004.pdf Accessed 17.05.13.
Smith, N. (2008). Uneven development: Nature, capital and the production of space.
Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Smith, M. (2009). Against ecological sovereignty: Agamben, politics and globalisation. Environmental Politics, 18(1), 99e116.
Soroos, M. (1997). The endangered atmosphere. Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press.
Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P., & McNeill, J. (2011). The anthropocene: from
global change to planetary stewardship. Ambio, 40, 739e761.
Swyngedouw, E. (2010). Apocalypse forever? Post-political populism and the
spectre of climate change. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(2e3), 213e232.
Swyngedouw, E. (2013). The non-political politics of climate change. Acme, 12(1), 1e8.
Theisen, O. M., Holtermann, H., & Buhaug, H. (2011). Climate wars?: assessing the
claim that drought breeds conflict. International Security, 36(3), 79e106.
Trenberth, K. (2012). Framing the way to relate climate extremes to climate change.
Climatic Change, 115, 283e290.
47
Turco, R. P., Toon, O. B., Ackerman, T. P., Pollack, J. B., & Sagan, C. (1983). Nuclear winter:
global consequences of multiple nuclear explosions. Science, 222, 1283e1292.
Uan, L. (2013). I-Kiribati want to migrate with dignity. Office of the President of
Kiribati.
http://www.climate.gov.ki/2013/02/12/i-kiribati-want-to-migratewith-dignity/?utm_source¼rss&utm_medium¼rss&utm_campaign¼i-kiribatiwant-to-migrate-with-dignity Accessed 17.05.13.
Urpelainen, J. (2012). Geoengineering and global warming: a strategic perspective. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 12(4), 375e389.
Vaughan, N. E., & Lenton, T. M. (2011). A review of geoengineering proposals. Climatic Change, 109(3/4), 745e790.
Vidal, J. (7 February 2013). Indian investors are forcing Ethiopians off their land. The
Guardian.
Vinthagen, S. (2013). Ten theses on why we need a ‘social science panel on climate
change’. Acme, 12(1), 155e176.
Ward, B., & Dubos, R. (1972). Only one earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Webersik, C. (2010). Climate change and security: A gathering storm of global challenges. Santa Barbara: Praeger.
Welzer, H. (2012). Climate wars. Cambridge: Polity.