Abstract

In 2003, chemist Paul Crutzen suggested we had reached a tipping point, shifting the globe from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, an era where humans had to be considered geologic agents in climate processes. In 2008, post-colonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty suggested that his introduction to the idea of the Anthropocene has fundamentally changed his relation to his own discipline. Is the Anthropocene, he asks, the price we pay for freedom? Drawing on a number of cross disciplinary sources – from Carbon Democracy to The Future History of the Arctic – I use this as an opportunity to explore how climate–as-process is currently being modelled, hoping to get beyond the often over-simplified ways these issues are presented to general publics. This is work in progress, emerging from an interdisciplinary network on Climate Histories, and forming part of an introduction to a forthcoming volume, In the Name of Climate Change. As such, I hope it will promote lively discussion on the part of the audience.