The New Climate Regime

Bruno Latour and his French effort in the AIME Project (An Inquiry Into Modes Of Existence = AIME) has important insights into what is needed to deal on a whole new level with climate change.

Here are some tweets this morning ( twitter AIMEproject)

AIME ‏@AIMEproject 6h6 hours ago
Trump’s innovation in politics is to define a whole movement on denial of ecological mutations, the indifference to facts is a consequence.

AIME ‏@AIMEproject 6h6 hours ago
It’s not Trump’ indifference to facts that makes his troops ignore climate, it’s because his job is to make US ignore climate 4 more years.

AIME ‏@AIMEproject 6h6 hours ago
Since the Exxon scandal in the 90s it’s clear that political affiliation is largely organised around climate denial, it trumps left/right.

AIME ‏@AIMEproject 6h6 hours ago
It’s not that people vote against their interests, it’s that people are now more interested in believing that you can escape climate 4 years

AIME ‏@AIMEproject 6h6 hours ago
The government of the 1% for the 1% by the 1% insures that they will be protected against the impact of ecological mutations, denial is key.

Latour’s metaphysics considers both human and non human actors. For example, water is an actor in North Dakota protests by water protectors. In fact the major political actor now is The New Climate Regime

His major project is Reset Modernity

Reset Modernity! Edited by Bruno Latour

Overview
Modernity has had so many meanings and tries to combine so many contradictory sets of attitudes and values that it has become impossible to use it to define the future. It has ended up crashing like an overloaded computer. Hence the idea is that modernity might need a sort of reset. Not a clean break, not a “tabula rasa,” not another iconoclastic gesture, but rather a restart of the complicated programs that have been accumulated, over the course of history, in what is often called the “modernist project.” This operation has become all the more urgent now that the ecological mutation is forcing us to reorient ourselves toward an experience of the material world for which we don’t seem to have good recording devices.

Reset Modernity! is organized around six procedures that might induce the readers to reset some of those instruments. Once this reset has been completed, readers might be better prepared for a series of new encounters with other cultures. After having been thrown into the modernist maelstrom, those cultures have difficulties that are just as grave as ours in orienting themselves within the notion of modernity. It is not impossible that the course of those encounters might be altered after modernizers have reset their own way of recording their experience of the world.

At the intersection of art, philosophy, and anthropology, Reset Modernity! has assembled close to sixty authors, most of whom have participated, in one way or another, in the Inquiry into Modes of Existence initiated by Bruno Latour. Together they try to see whether such a reset and such encounters have any practicality. Much like the two exhibitions Iconoclash and Making Things Public, this book documents and completes what could be called a “thought exhibition:” Reset Modernity! held at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe from April to August 2016. Like the two others, this book, generously illustrated, includes contributions, excerpts, and works from many authors and artists.

Exactly for this reason:

Of course as winter storms hit the US the deniers will point out the windows and say look see.

Even though "global warming" is technically correct, it's too easy for the deniers to fool the non-technical public, as you point out. Something like "global weather disruption" would have let the scientists point at those same winter storms and say "see?" And the heat waves. And the ice loss both north and south. And ...

          so obviously scientists don't really know anything · · ·

          Understanding data is at once a trivial process and an enormously difficult task. Everyone of us have run into this many times in our careers. Just a few weeks ago I was trying to make a point (somewhere else on the internet) using a graphical representation of some data. The loyal opposition pointed to some trivial difference between the scales on one of the axes and spiraled off into the "neverland" of "you are fraudulently representing the data" and "you have no credibility" blah blah blah · · · Well this is the internet and anonymity is the norm, so I said screw it, deleted my side of the "conversation", and went on with my life.

          In real life this sort of thing seldom (if ever) happens. The problem is that most (or perhaps that should read "far too many") decision makers don't hangout with us, literally. For most politicians we are benign magicians at best and evil sorcerers at worst. This, BTW, is true at all levels of government, not just at the national level. I cannot count the number of VIP visits to this university campus where, avoiding the faculty (particularly those recalcitrant faculty) while hobnobbing with obsequious administrators, was the de jure activity.

We in the US don't have that excuse.

Our mass media propaganda machines have definitely had an effect upon public opinion about climate change in the US. I am still amazed when I talk to college educated people who still do not believe in it. Denial (especially fueled by political beliefs) is a very strong thing to overcome. Facts have no bearing on the deniers.

Personally, I think we are already screwed. I am glad I do not have children or grandchildren. The future for the generations who follow us is very bleak.

Not only are the we the only creatures that contemplate our personal death but now we are the first and maybe the last to contemplate the extermination of our entire species. Way to to Homo Sapiens.