An impossible Earth: computer simulation, data, and the weather in the era of the ecological a priori

Even in the modern era, when the effects of climate change can be felt all over the globe, the majority of what we know about the phenomenon comes from computer simulations. The reason for this is that climate change is an unbelievably large phenomenon—it’s happening everywhere all at once. Therefore, humans could not have perceived climate change if it weren't for the interconnected infrastructure of computer processing, information networks, and bureaucratic administration that made the idea of a planetary history possible. Climate happens over a long period of time, and global climate change has indicated a shift in the average temperature over the entire globe. These two facts required non-human computational power and a global information network to come into existence before humanity could register our warming climate. Computer simulations, especially, used a combination of deep geological data and written meteorological records—archives written in stone and ink, respectively—to predict both the weather and the climate. In short, anthropogenic climate change is a media event.

This dissertation is a history of and a meditation on the early computer experiments that taught us how to “see” the atmosphere. By exploring the historical context and intellectual consequences of these experiments, a new understanding of our current environmental and technological situation comes into focus: our digital environments and our natural environments are not as different as we may initially assume.