The Temporality of Climate Witnessing

The act of witnessing is often predicated on the experience of an event in its here and/ or now . Climate confounds these space-time coordinates, requiring a reconsideration of the witness and the temporality of witnessing. Transposing media witnessing by way of the “geological turn” in media studies, this article tracks ice as a proxy for climate, as both storage medium and image, to develop a notion of climate witnessing that pivots on the t/here and then , a probabilistic and subjunctive sensibility, an ethic that posits simulation as climate. The first part examines the chain of mediation from which the records stored in ice are decoded (including ice cores and mass spectrometers). The second part examines the logic of repeatability in computer simulation that uses and structures those data into addressable phenomena. Finally, the third part brings these two together to consider the temporality of climate witnessing via the voice of proxy images of climate change

Climate change · Mediation · Temporality · Witness · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions