Toward a Political Economy of Neoliberal Climate Science [A version of a chapter forthcoming in David Tyfield, Rebecca Lave, Samuel Randalls and Charles Thorpe (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Science (London, Routledge).] Larry Lohmann Mainstream scientific and political work on climate change tends to be organized around a binary division between adaptation and mitigation. Global warming – modelled as a nonhuman “nature” of molecular flows and heat exchanges – is seen to impact on an undifferentiated “society”, which returns the favour by, for example, limiting greenhouse gas emissions or re-engineering “nature” so that it can absorb more of them. This peculiar dualism, which recapitulates other nature/society divides developed over the multi-century history of capital, nourishes certain kinds of science and politics but blocks others, and encourages certain kinds of scientists-nonscientist relationship over others. Critical political economy of climate science could help make for better science and politics not only by exploring the dualism's contingency, but also by challenging the dichotomy between climatology and politics. This work could benefit from exchanges with commoners, peasants and indigenous peoples whose movements have long been developing tools for contending with such binaries. Perhaps even more than the other types of “nature” that are said to constitute the subject matters of the sciences, “the climate”, “climate change” and “the climate system” are often construed today as monoliths, essentialized and externalized from a similarly block-like “society”. Policymakers, environmentalists and flood refugees are commonly understood to be connected to an independently-coherent natural world of climate through interaction points across which biophysical processes are held to impinge on an otherwise relatively self-enclosed social or human world. This is seen to happen in two ways. The first is through brute “external shocks to social and environmental systems” (Taylor 2015: 32; see also Hulme 2011) to which society must “adapt”. The second is through representation of those “external” biophysical processes or systems within various “internal cultural frames” (Taylor 2015: 39), notably those of a climate-scientist profession commonly understood to have a privileged method for interpreting signals passing through interfaces with nature (Rouse 2002) while filtering out static from society. Conversely, human influence on climate is seen, as Marcus Taylor puts it, as an “outside 'forcing' to an otherwise coherent model of atmospheric dynamics” (Taylor 2015: 38). Changes in a climate pre-formulated in terms of heat transfers, CO 2 molecules, cloud albedo and methane clathrates are to be collectively “mitigated” via a management gateway through which a sparsely-specified “internal” reorganization of society via energy or economic policy can be focused on a separate physical world. Thus it was considered a normal piece of global policymaking for the 2015 Paris climate agreement to set itself up as a passage-point through which a unitary “international community” would be able to formulate ways to hold global average temperature rise in a similarly black-boxed physical climate system to “well below 2° C above pre-industrial levels” (UNFCCC 2015: 21). In this way, the environmentalist homily that society or the economy depend on and subsist within a climate system, “far from marking humanity’s reintegration into the world, signals the culmination of a process of separation” (Ingold 2000: 209) involving distinct systems “locked into an endless dance of adaptation” (Taylor 2015: 39). Today, the theme that climate is a nonhuman “force of nature”, interpreted by climatologists, “that enfolds upon a similarly coherent society” that duly returns the favour is “firmly engrained in the 1