Envisioning the future by predicting the past: Proxies, praxis and prognosis in paleoclimatology

This article contrasts two different modes of foretelling the future within paleoclimatology. The first is represented by Danish paleoclimatology and their project of deep-ice core drilling in Greenland, which seeks to profile a specific climatic period called “the Eemian”. Dating approximately from 125,000 to 115,000 years BP, the Eemian was the last warm interglacial period before the advent of the Holocene some 12000 years BP, and thus serves as an analogue to contemporary global warming. I contrast this mode of prognostication with the temperature curve by Michael Mann et al. (1998), which demonstrate that global mean temperatures have risen in conjunction with the consumption of fossil fuels visualized in a graph that became known as the “Hockey Stick”. I argue that in the first case we have a form of analogue reasoning, which predicts the past in order to envision the future. In the second case we have a thoroughly modern technology of anticipation, predicated on Enlightenment ideas about the visual economy of chronological timelines. From the vantage point of this contrast, I discuss the political nature of proxies, where I argue that the STS-field could be more attentive to the imaginations and aspirations of the paleoclimatologists themselves.