Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object.
The calculable, predictable, overseen and singular Earth has revealed not only aeons of global weather, but a new kind of planet – and, with it, a new mode of governance. What is startling about this is not that our technical abilities have exceeded Richardson’s wildest dreams but the unexpected repercussions of the modern ‘forecast factory’. Since the 1960s, the scope of what Richardson called weather prediction has expanded dramatically: climate models now stretch into the deep past and future, encompassing the entirety of the Earth system rather than just the atmosphere. Clouds and numbers seemed to crowd the sky. By the 1960s, numerical calculation of global weather conditions had become a standardised way of recording changes in the atmosphere. Though his factory never materialised exactly as he imagined it, his dream of a calculable planet now seems prophetic. Richardson died in 1953, the year IBM released the first mass-produced electronic computer. His ‘factory’ saw once-scattered local observations merging into a coherent planetary system: calculable, predictable, overseen and singular. But through the fantasy he could ignore practical problems and bring an entire planet into focus. Following hundreds of pages of equations, velocities and data in his prosaically titled book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), he asks the reader to indulge him: ‘After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy?’ For Richardson, one of the main limitations on weather forecasting was a lack of computational capacity.
This ‘forecast factory’ was the dream of the 20th-century English mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. And in the middle of the hall, on a large pulpit at the top of a tall multistorey pillar, stands the ‘man in charge’, who coordinates the scattered weather calculations from his computers into a global forecast like a ‘conductor of an orchestra’. Imagine that working in these seats are 64,000 ‘computers’ – humans doing calculations – each preparing a different weather forecast for their designated geography. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Picture this hall ‘like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth.
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