Political Climates: Proxy, Population, and Global Heating

Abstract

As climates cannot be perceived, they demand mediation. This article reviews recent media historiographical writing about the epistemological problems of mediating climate change. Knowledge about global heating is tethered to computer history. Cultural pathways define how the global climate’s numerical abstractions become a set of images, which can be arbitrary and politically motivated. To account for how certain images come to stand in for the global climate, this article proposes a media historiographical method that moves between the history of ecological ideas and corresponding practices of mediation. To illustrate the method, this study compiles a media history of the U.S. political context in which population growth became a proxy for global heating. This proxy relationship shaped environmentalist media, including nontheatrical film, Hollywood fiction productions, right-wing advertising campaigns, and popular documentaries. Such representations utilize predictions of the future of the earth’s population as a stand-in for carbon dioxide, interpreted in terms of per person emissions. At stake are questions regarding the media historiographical narration of climate change: Why do specific images persist as descriptions of global heating? This article argues in favor of a politically conscious historical methodology that accounts for the media history of the warming present. Confronting this specific xenophobic genealogy is critical to identifying obstinate, pervasive, and strangely axiomatic equations between population and global heating persistent in recent climate change media.