Imagining Climate Engineering Dreaming of the Designer Climate

"The novelist J.G. Ballard once said that the earth was the only truly alien world. Climate engineering promises to make it both more alien and more familiar. By deliberately intervening in atmospheric processes, such "geoengineering" could create an artificially managed climate but one that ideally would be cooler and calmer than our present fevered state. But - to what end?

In this gripping, wide-ranging and erudite study, we are reminded that technologists and skeptics-plus all of us between those poles-hold perspectives based on stories we may not even know we tell ourselves. Yet such stories-their metaphors, their ways of looking, their assumptions about morality-are deeply imbricated in the possible futures of a planet that may have to embrace-or endure-climate engineering.

Combining history, policy, philosophy and more, Jeroen Ooomen's Imagining Climate Engineering is an eye-opening account of the climate-engineering community that could play an outsized role in determining the vitality of the planet and the durability of civilization.

This nuanced book on climate engineering is the book I've been waiting for. Anyone who cares about climate change needs to read it." - Christopher Cokinos, Professor of English, University of Arizona, author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds.

"Imagining Climate Engineering is an important book that that properly situates the history of climate engineering research in international context, and shows how different ways of seeing shape battles about the future of the world. Oomen cleverly combines insights from Science and Technology Studies, history, sociology, and humanities to provide the first ethnologically informed assessment of climate engineering. The book is essential reading for scholars of Science and Technology Studies/ sociology of science and climate governance." - Silke Beck, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ Leipzig

"Meet the climate engineers: This timely and lucid study explores the dreams and the disagreements of climate engineering researchers about technological solutions to anthropogenic climate change. Jeroen Oomen innovatively combines historical, sociological and ethnographic approaches to the imaginary of a stable climate shaped by large-scale climate interventions. The outcome is a compelling investigation into the vital question of how selective climate futures can become collective, and which political, ethical and environmental tradeoffs these visions entail to appear rational, reliable, and desirable." - Sabine Höhler, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, author of Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990