In recent years, future climate change has increasingly been recognized as one of the most important issues of the twenty-first century, challenging the very structure of our global society. No longer just an abstruse scientific concern, it prompts difficult choices for both individuals and governments. Moreover, it is of the first importance to those working in disciplines such as climatology, engineering, economics, sociology, geopolitics, local politics, law, and global health.

Emanating from across the social and natural sciences, as well as in the humanities, serious scholarship on future climate change flourishes now as it has never done before, and this new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in the Environment, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a vast literature—and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by leading scholars in the field, this new Routledge Major Work is a four-volume collection of foundational and cutting-edge contributions.

The first volume (‘Science’) in the collection deals with the development of the science of global warming and climate change, starting with Tyndall (1861), through to the IPCC synthesis (2007), and ending with the very latest research. Volume II (‘Impact Assessments’), meanwhile, assembles the best thinking on how the potential physical, biological, social-political, and economic impacts of climate change are assessed. This volume also includes material on potential surprises that science is starting to investigate, such as the rapid melting of the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets, die back of the Amazon rainforest, release of gas hydrates, and other tipping points. The third volume (‘Politics and Solutions’) gathers the most influential research on climate-change solutions; it encompasses global and local politics, engineering, renewable energy, and geoengineering. The final volume in the collection (‘Framing the Debate’) brings together key scholarship to question and explore how the climate-change debate has been framed and reframed as a scientific, economic, security, health, development, geopolitical, ethical, and cultural issue.

With comprehensive introductions to each volume, newly written by the editors, which place the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Future Climate Change is an essential collection destined to be welcomed as a vital research resource by all scholars and students of the subject.

includes: Chapter 27, R. Hamblyn and M. J. Callanan, ‘Of Exactitude in Science’, Data Soliloquies (Slade Press, 2009), pp. 23–43.

FutureEverything, taking place 12-15 May in Manchester UK. Expect world premieres of astonishing artworks, an explosive citywide music programme, visionary thinkers from around the world, and awards for outstanding innovations.

Serendipity City: The FutureEverything 2010 main exhibition, featuring architecture-inspired art, a curated selection of city-drifting iPhone and Android apps, jaw-dropping data visualisations including Martin John Callanan’s A Planetary Order, and a selection of FutureEverything 2010 Award nominees. The venue is The Hive (47 Lever Street, Manchester M1 1FN), a spanking new Northern Quarter location.

Data Soliloquies is a book about the extraordinary cultural fluidity of scientific data. A wide array of graphs, charts, computer models and other forms of visual advocacy have become inescapable fixtures of public science presentations, though they are often treated as if they were neutral ‘found objects’ rather than elaborate narrative constructions containing high levels of statistical uncertainty. Through a mix of essays and artworks, this witty and engaging book — the result of a collaboration between Richard Hamblyn and Martin John Callanan during their terms as writer and artist in residence at the UCL Environment Institute — examines the theatricality of scientific data display, while critiquing some of the poorly designed statistical wallpaper that surrounds so much public science debate.

ISBN 9780903305044 (January 2010)

Available for order on Sladepress.com

Reviews
Furtherfield, Pau Waelder

A couple of blog posts about A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe):
The RSA Arts and Ecology Centre
Boing Boing
Lost At E Minor

This two-day symposium brings together scientists, artists, social scientists and policy-makers to explore scientific controversy from an interdisciplinary perspective. From esoteric arguments over the structure of the universe to highly charged public controversies around the use of stem cells, Eye of the Storm will touch on brilliance and ego, dissent and whistle-blowing, big science, high finance, deviant science, the reliability of knowledge and the legislation of uncertainty.

Martin John Callanan as Artist in Residence at UCL Environment Institute, alongside Richard Hamblyn the Writer in Residence, will be presenting.

Organised in collaboration with and supported by The Arts Catalyst and Tate Britain in association with Leonardo/OLATS

Tate Britain Auditorium (booking required)
Friday 19 June 2009, 10.00–19.30
Saturday 20 June 2009, 10.00–17.30

The UCL Environment Institute, Slade School of Fine Art, and David & Charles Publishers invite you to an evening reception to celebrate

the unveiling of Martin John Callanan’s A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe)

and the publication of Richard Hamblyn’s Extraordinary Clouds

on Tuesday 30th June 2009, 6:30-9:00pm
at the Main Quadrangle, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT