Books Forum Speaking climate change to power Joshua P. Howe Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming. University of Wash- ington Press, Seattle, 2014, US$24.95, ISBN: 978-0295993683 Candis Callison How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Duke University Press, Durham, 2010, US$24.95, ISBN: 978-0822357872 Reviewed by Martin Skrydstrup Department of Food & Resource Economics, Section for Global Development, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. E-mail: mchs@ifro.ku.dk BioSocieties (2016) 11, 401–405. doi:10.1057/s41292-016-0024-1; published online 7 September 2016 When your reviewer participated in the events running up to COP 15 in Copenhagen, I witnessed the then Danish Prime Minister push a number of prominent IPCC climate scientists to tell him if the agreement he had recently struck with the EU in Brussels would still be sufficient to limit global temperature increase to no more than 2 degrees: ‘‘I think it is time for the scientific world to come to an agreement with itself: what is the real platform for politicians?’’ the Prime Minister asked the panel of IPCC representatives. Hard pressed for fixed degrees, certainties, and expeditious yes-or-no answers, the German climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf responded: ‘‘There is uncertainty in our science and the uncer- tainty often works in the direction that things turn out somewhat worse’’ (Skrydstrup, 2009). Rather than another theoretical treatise on the epistemology of encounters between power and science or between politics and ‘‘relevant, yet neutral and non-prescrip- tive’’ truth-answers, a more promising avenue might be to ask why science is considered the ‘‘real platform for politicians’’ today and secondly to reflect on how scientific facts travel and are translated into action by various publics. Two recent books each follow these paths: Howe’s Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming offers a broad historical account of the first question and Candis Callison’s How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Com- munal Life of Facts provides us with an ethnographic tour-de-force through what she calls ‘‘five discursive communities’’ (p. 6) comprising the American public to unravel the second question. Genealogies first. Howe’s book tackles the funda- mental question of why it came to be that what he calls the ‘‘science-first approach’’ has become the dominant framing of the climate change issue in the contemporary. The arc of Howe’s argument begins on the deck of the vessel Scripps in the year of 1936, where a young Revelle (1909–1991) – self-pro- claimed ‘‘granddaddy of global warming’’ (p. 12) – collects specimens in jars as a good oceanographer of the time. Howe argues that Revelle framed CO 2 rise as a form of ‘‘natural experiment,’’ enabled by the new tools and technologies of Cold War science. In 1956, as a Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Revelle hired Keeling (1928–2005), who in 1958 began to measure CO 2 at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i, establishing an atmospheric baseline for CO 2 at 315 ppm in March that year. Today, the Keeling Curve, alongside the hockey stick curve, is the most famous icon of global warming; however, in 1958, ‘‘Keeling was little more than ‘a peculiar guy’ living on a volcano and trying to figure out the best way to measure CO 2 ’’ (p. 20). Chapter 1 oscillates between this sort of loosely drawn character portraits and the nodes and hubs of an ever-expanding Cold War science infrastructure geared toward tracing the atmospheric circulation of carbon as part of nuclear radiation testing. Howe shows persuasively how this Cold War mapping of carbon dioxide opens a window into planetary climate change, which was nothing more than a mere conjecture in the 1950s, but which stabilized into a firm scientific hypothesis in the course of the Martin Skrydstrup is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Global Development Group, Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen. He has pursued an ethnography of ice core drilling in Greenland, but is now working on agrarian questions and climate change in Kenya. Ó 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1745-8552 BioSocieties Vol. 11, 3, 401–405 www.palgrave.com/journals