Representing climate change: Dialogue about,and through,an expanded sense of scale

Abstract

This article explores the link between ‘scalar thinking’ and the quality of our collective dialogues about anthropogenic climate change. Climate must be thought because it can’t be experienced directly. Climate change is an idea we fill with content, both scientific and moral, cognitive and normative. The idea can catalyse profound thought, deep dialogue and well-considered collective action, but only when a broad ‘scalar sensitivity’ is operative. This article makes the case for scale as one of our most perspicuous lenses for seeing what's at stake in a climate-changed world. After commenting on the state of current dialogue about climate change, I remind readers what scale means in the English language. Thereafter, the scalar dimensions of climate change are highlighted. Scale emerges as a powerful ‘convening concept’ that can engender ‘fractal discourse’ about climate change of the sort we require. We need to think about scale beyond its obvious dimensions of space and time.

We’re currently in the midst of an immense scalar recalibration on dozens of fronts, both individual and collective, as we adjust to these newly elaborate scalar entanglements. Joshua DiCaglio (2021 : 180).

Introduction

Anthropogenic climate change has been described as a ‘hyper-object’ that confronts us with a headache-inducing set of ‘super-wicked problems’ – that is, deeply political, high stakes problems where uncertainty, discordant values, inequality and social power asymmetries play extremely important roles. Relative to all necessarily placed-based human beings, climate change is spatially and temporally vast: it's imperceptible to us without various technologies, categories, data sets, metrics and images created by geoscientists and many others. Climate change cannot speak for itself, it must be spoken for – as must its multifarious local-to-regional causes and impacts. As Mike Hulme (2009) noted in Why We Disagree About Climate Change and elsewhere, the idea of climate change is the representational means we collectively use to grapple with the intricate links between us, a changing climate and other parts of the so-called Earth System. The idea is now overflowing with content, though some prefer to narrow its meaning and treat it as a grand pollution problem of ‘matter out of place’.

Fundamentally, the idea is unsettling – ‘properly’ political, as some might say – because, in seeking to both understand and respond to the realities of climate change, very different framings are in play. These often irreconcilable framings span the cognitive and normative dimensions of climate change; they have to reckon with a phenomenon that's hyper-complex, protean and impossible to predict with any real precision. As a result, climate change is nowadays necessarily a contested idea – not so much the fact of rapid global warming, as how best to account for the who, what, where and why of causes, responsibilities, liabilities, impacts and best courses of action. In this discursive space, differences and antagonisms abound. Climate change isn’t one thing but many things, over and above whatever scientific consensus prevails about its fundamental physical aspects. At base, it raises ‘constitutional’ questions about our common world and our various modes of existence (Latour, 2018).

The launch of this journal raises a key question about the state of play of climate change dialogue – within and beyond the university world inhabited by most people reading these words. I will explore what the idea of ‘scale’ can play in this dialogue. In what follows, I first make some broad claims about the discursive climate in the mid-2020s, with a focus on Anglophone discussions (minus extensive citations for the sake of brevity). I then suggest that an expanded notion of scale offers a potent means to build the many bridges needed to keep deep dialogue alive – indeed, to strengthen it. Scale, despite its apparent semantic ‘dryness’, is one of those ideas that has the power to foster conversations and to connect seemingly disparate issues, people and places together. It's a usefully ‘diffractive’ idea when its many meanings are deployed as an ensemble. Its convening power is already evident, but only intermittently in my view. Rephrased, scalar thinking needs to become a mental reflex or sine qua non, but in ways richer than geographers like me are normally wont to think about it. It can and should be more than simply one ‘tool’ among many we employ to apprehend our climate changed world. It deserves, as it were, to be part of our neural DNA, within and beyond the academic realm.

I’ll now make my case in four sections. I begin with some context and scene-setting then go on to show that scale is the very essence of climate change after defining ‘scale’ in several ways. This short article is inspired by a wider ‘scalar turn’ in the social sciences and humanities this last 15 years, evident in work by Joshua DiCaglio (2021), Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021), Timothy Clark (2015), Deborah Coen (2019), Nancy Fraser (2008), David Pellow (2018) and Derek Woods (2017), among others. This turn has occurred adjacent to, though is rather different from, the major scale-focus of human geographers like Neil Smith evident in the nineties and noughties. My article also both revisits and reaches beyond the insights offered in some classic early publications about climate change and scale (Cash et al., 2006; Folke et al., 1996; Gibson et al., 2000; Sayre, 2010; Turner et al., 1990).

The idea of climate change today: Flimsy, fractious and fractal, all at once

‘Climate change’ is these days pervasive in our collective discourse and we know why. Huge credit must go to climate scientists and the United Nations for a multi-decade effort to ensure proper tracking of greenhouse gas emissions and wide reporting to national governments and publics. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been integral, of course. Its high-profile activities have triggered all manner of debates in the domains of academia, civil society, government and business. But what does ‘climate change’ now signify 40 years after it first caught the attention of political leaders?

Needless to say, it depends where you look and who you talk to. There are different debates unfolding. Many people – not all of them American, I should say! – still don’t believe that the atmosphere is warming, that human activities are the driver or that the resulting impacts are any worse than the ‘natural’ ones we’ve witnessed for centuries. In other cases, the scientific consensus about climate change is fully acknowledged, but the problem is in effect treated as a ‘tame’ one. There's a faith in some quarters that a mixture of GHG offsetting, ‘negative emissions technologies’ and solar radiation management can tackle what's seen as an epic pollution problem of ‘negative externalities’ and ‘unintended consequences’. This is a flimsy, brittle understanding of climate change which nonetheless has a lot of traction. It accents scientific discovery, innovative technologies, goal-setting and clever policy instruments. It imagines anthropogenic climate change to be a problem akin to ‘acid rain’, ozone layer thinning or the over-harvesting of fish stocks, only on a bigger scale. It appeals to private companies looking to make money from a ‘greening’ of the capitalist economy; to experts and problem-solvers in the science and policy worlds; to governments who aren’t keen on discussing the radical implications of runaway climate change; and to citizens burdened with many immediate worries about jobs, their children's education, the cost of housing, and so on. This understanding of climate change comports with ‘expertocracy’, a thin conception of democracy and the right of private companies to be pace-setters for what could turn out to be very risky technofixes for the global warming problem.

Once we move to a wider and deeper framing of climate change, things quickly get fractious. Radical critics and activists call out the plutocrats, greedy corporations, timid states-people and compliant politicians who are allowing a ‘hothouse Earth’ to become a reality. For them – I am one of them – climate change as a physical phenomenon needs to be understood as equally a social phenomenon in which unelected power, undue human inequality, callous anthropocentrism and other maladies play a key role. Of course, there are disagreements about the exact social causes and consequences of climate change; about who is doing what to who, where, why, and with what moral-legal ramifications. There are Marxist, feminist, ecocentric, institutionalist, post-developmentalist, decolonial and other narratives that variously compete and interfuse in an effort to account for climate change in explanatory and normative terms. Naturally, many people aren’t tuning in to these narratives, nor to the prominent thinker-activists protesting in their name, such as Greta Thunberg, George Monbiot, Bill McKibben, and Naomi Klein. We seemingly live in a period where polarisation is rife and the careful consideration of rival perspectives of little interest to many people. Non-communication or dialogues of the deaf are common, especially in the mediatised public square. People who feel ‘cancelled’, disrespected or preached at refrain from intelligent debate and cling to their current beliefs. Special interests sow seeds of confusion and aim for ‘predatory delay’ in addressing the climate change challenge.

The climate change idea in its flimsy form is positively dangerous. But the fracturing that occurs when climate change is infused with deeper analytical and normative content is also, clearly, problematic. What should be a profound debate about our planetary present and future unfolds only in enclaves, failing to shape thought and sentiment where it counts. Key protagonists don’t really hear each other across ethico-political divides. This is why many critics pronounce that Western democracies have become ‘post-political’. The semblance of free speech and open debate about people and planet is maintained. But serious plans for major societal change are given short-shrift, being dubbed as ‘fanciful’ or ‘infeasible’ by those who wield power. This leaves plenty of space for entrepreneurs and big corporations to develop technofixes that will supposedly ‘save the day’. Meanwhile, a rancorous public domain offers plenty of discursive heat and noise, but little light.

The hope – naïve but necessary – is that the idea of climate change become a more ‘fractal’ one that is enabling. By fractal, I mean an idea that acts as a meeting place where equally legitimate but different framings of the problem-solution set enter into dialogue. This can’t take the form of some egalitarian pluralism or liberal-democratic encounter of equals. The reality, we know, is a socially riven world where the discursive playing field is never level because the surrounding economic, cultural and political playing fields are highly unequal. Even so, there are already arenas where fractal climate change dialogue occurs – for instance, parts of critical social science and the humanities where indigenous thought has come to the fore in relation to ‘climate injustice’ and reparations. The challenge is to somehow broaden this out into the often hostile, adversarial environments that are the national (and transnational) public sphere, various civil societies and professional politics. Obviously, we shouldn’t hold our breath. But if fragility and fractiousness continue to characterise collective discussions of what climate change is all about, the need for a fractal dialogue – however imperfectly realised in practice – only grows. Fractal dialogue is hard work; it aims for deep conversations without destructive polarisation or a presumptively narrow sense of what the climate change ‘problem’ looks like. It is political through and through.

Climate change and the fluid architecture of thinking

What I’m calling a fractal dialogue aims for ‘diffraction’ or positive interference among social differences. It would benefit from some mental rules or heuristics to enable it. Thinking across very different perspectives is never easy. Anthropogenic climate change ups-the-ante significantly. As Naomi Klein (2014) famously noted, it changes everything because it knows no bounds. This may seem to invite ‘integrated thinking’ on a truly epic scale, for instance using the language of complex socio-environmental systems. But it's much more complicated than this once we fully acknowledge that climate change is about facts and values, actualities and various wished-for futures. As many have noted, there's no ‘one world’ synthesis possible in either the epistemic or political sense of representation. That sort of heroic integrated thinking is misplaced in many or most contexts. In social science and the humanities, the literatures exploring ‘pluriverses’ and ‘ontological politics’ are one illustration of why. And yet, because anthropogenic climate change implicates everyone, differences of interest and outlook can’t ignore or talk past each other in the long run. There has to be meaningful dialogue as a post-Holocene world takes shape: fractal and intersectional, but not integrationist (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014). This is what Andrew Stirling has been pressing for in a sequence of helpful and much-cited publications appearing over the years. ¹

For any serious interlocutor, a certain mental agility is required to grapple with the super-wicked, deeply political character of climate change. Thinking needs somehow to be expansive, flexible and generous without succumbing to a closed holism (the sort of ‘totalising’ thought that Marxism was long criticised for). Such thinking must be relational but not in the ‘atomistic’ sense of connecting things that never really change once brought (thought about) together both analytically and ethically. Such thinking is, in a real sense, both impossible and necessary. It tests the cognitive capacities of mere mortals: nothing less than ‘everything, everywhere, all at once, now and tomorrow’ is at issue as anthropogenic climate change escalates. How does one zoom-in and zoom-out without becoming dizzy and confused? How does one weigh different interests in a myriad of different places, both now and in light of duties to future generations, without being overwhelmed? Is a style of thinking called for so Baroque that it is, ironically, unable to be used for the very task it's designed for?

Without pretending to offer a good answer to these questions, I want to recommend ‘scale’ as a potent lens through which to view our multidimensional climate changed – ever changing – world. For readers who may think we’re already adept at scalar thinking, I beg to differ. True: scale is frequently mentioned in all manner of climate change discussions, be it in the geographic sense or the temporal one. Here, space-time extension, dilation, ‘jumping’, interdependency, stretching and the like are at issue. In addition, similar ideas of scale are often present in many other discussions, such as those about multi-level and polycentric governance of GHG emissions and offsets. Here scale is implicit without necessarily being thematised. And in the discipline of geography, of course, an exceedingly fertile body of concepts and arguments about scale exists, some of which animates writings about climate change (though usually about political economy). Meanwhile, scale is now receiving sustained attention in fields such as literary studies (e.g. Wenzel, 2020) and anthropology (e.g. Carr and Lempert, 2016). And yet: scalar thinking in a broad and rich sense seems to be elusive because it's currently scattered and disparate. There's potential to join dots between different senses of ‘scale’ in ways that can exert a useful convening power in future discussions of anthropogenic climate change.

Let me now illustrate what I mean, albeit much too briefly for lack of sufficient space. ² My tack is to regard the many meanings of the word ‘scale’ as advantageous, rather than bemoan their variety. The key is to hold the meanings together in shared discourse about climate change. In my view, scale reaches parts that other academically well-known convening concepts, such as ‘assemblages’ and networks, have been unable to reach. It has the useful property of being both an academic concept and a common-a-garden term used in public discourse.

Defining scale

Think about some of the different meanings of the world scale in the English language, noting that the word is employed as both a noun and a verb (as in ‘scaling’ or ‘to scale’). Chief among the meanings are the following:

The geographical and temporal extent of objects, relationships and processes: In ordinary language, we routinely talk about the ‘local scale’ and ‘global scale’, about the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’ scale, about the short-term, the medium-term and the long-term. Scale here refers to the ‘units’ of reality in which we are interested, and the boundaries that mark these units off each from the other. The boundaries may be purely epistemic or else real, as with national borders, the edges of a forest ecosystem or the outer limits of the world's atmosphere.

The size of phenomena: This is linked to but different from the first meaning. When we talk of something being ‘large scale’ we mean it is relatively big or bulky. Yet ubiquitous phenomena can be small scale, despite their considerable space-time extent. Micro-organisms are an example, as is each building and street in a city. Together, lots of relatively small things can have a widespread presence, as the recent pandemic showed. This can be in aggregate form or by way of causal connections among them that establish a ‘whole’ or ‘level’ above (superordinate to) any of the individual components.

The relative value or position of two or more things: In legal parlance, we talk about ‘weighing’ things on the ‘scales of justice’, a metaphor drawn historically from the literal practice of recording the relative weight of items like rice grains, flour or iron beams. In seismology and meteorology, the Richter and Beaufort scales compare the relative energy discharged in biophysical events. Meanwhile, the Geological Timescale establishes the sequence and relative duration of different segments of the Earth's long history. ‘Scaling’, as a practice of comparing and locating, is a very widespread practice indeed. Here ‘value’ can refer to size, extent, relative position (e.g. temporal order) and/or importance (i.e. significance).

To ascend or climb: When talk about ‘scaling’ a mountain or a rock wall we’re talking, fundamentally, about getting a different view on things. As we go higher we see more, spatially speaking. But we necessarily see at a lower level of resolution because we’re further away. New things may hove into view, but other things become indistinct and abstract. The same applies when we ‘down scale’, say from a forest to a single tree. As the mathematical ecologist Simon Levin (1992) once said, the world looks very different depending on the size of the window you are looking through.

To deliberately alter the extent of something in the world: The word ‘scaling’ also means ‘to expand’, as when a successful new business opens multiple retail outlets in several countries so as to operate ‘at scale’. The business, we might say, ‘scales up’ or ‘scales out’ its operations. The reverse is to ‘scale back’ or ‘scale down’.

The extent of a representation of aspects of reality relative to what's being represented: Classically, all maps have a scale, as (necessarily) does any ostensibly ‘realistic’ depiction of the world in whatever medium (e.g. a film, a book, a photograph). When representing processes and events unfolding through time – past, present or future – the scale can be 1:1, slowed down or speeded up. Necessarily, as we scale-out – representationally – the granularity of what we see diminishes and a more selective, aggregated and abstract picture of a larger extent is painted. While real world phenomena exist at different scales, there is no evading the representational aspect of scaling.

Clearly, there's a considerable richness of meaning here. Scale involves seeing, comparing, relating and assessing a world chock-full of phenomena and interconnections. It's as much about who's doing the looking, how and from where, as it is about the things being perceived. But scale is also about acting – for instance, when, by accident or design, one makes something once ‘local’ (like a single McDonald's fast food outlet) into something ‘global’ (similar outlets in thousands of places worldwide as part of one company). Indeed, economic, political and social geographers have undertaken a great many theoretical and empirical studies of strategic ‘re-scaling’ since the 1990s, focussed on firms, states and civil society actors. So scale, understood in the round, is about what's perceived and appraised, about what's actual and about how our actions reconfigure aspects of the vast, tangled world that we inhabit. It's a moving matrix of thought and practice. It's constructed and real. As anthropologists E. Summerson Carr and Michael Lempert put in their edited book Scale (2016), ‘There isn’t anything that cannot be scaled, and no scale is inviolable’ (p. 18). Furthermore, ‘scale relies both on the “being” of phenomena and a reference to the one who is measuring as a means of coming to know being’ (DiCaglio, 2021: 8).

Climate change seen through a scalar lens: A coordinate system for mapping issues and engaging different frames

With these definitions in mind, let's now read climate change in scalar terms, starting with the most obvious dimensions of scale. I throw in some indicative citations here and there but intentionally avoid exhaustive referencing.

Scalar compression of space and time: Climate change arises from the worldwide dispersal of molecules from various point sources, with fossil fuel combustion the prime underlying contributor. Decades of local scale emissions, widely and unevenly spread, have warmed the atmosphere at a geologically rapid rate. The effects of warming are now felt everywhere, the more so as time goes on. Generations of as-yet unborn humans, along with innumerable organisms, ecosystems and landscapes, will feel the effects of processes already set in motion. Climate change, driven by the richer countries and a growth-addicted economic system, erodes scalar separations that once applied. It is boundless: the local shapes the global, the present infuses the far future, and both occur in non-trivial ways. In short, climate change involves an unprecedented extension of human influence on the atmosphere and, by implication, on everything else. The Umwelt of a modern person is multi-scalar in ways very different to our predecessors. New spatio-temporalities of cause, effect and response arise; entanglements are increasingly intimate, ‘thick’ and manifold. They underpin a plethora of claims being made about international and inter-generational liabilities, harms, responsibilities and means of redress.

Scale-specific dimensions and effects: While scalar separation has been eroded through climate change, this doesn’t imply the dissolution of all scalar distinctions. Far from it. Joshua DiCaglio (2021) talks of related but distinct ‘scale domains’ pertaining to phenomena and their relations, echoing a classic paper by Stanley Schumm and Robert Lichty (1965). Domain boundaries mark scalar discontinuities. At the local and regional scales, for instance, there are crucial issues of impact and responsibility: critical ecosystems of global significance need protecting lest ‘tipping points’ be passed; and major polluters not only need to mitigate more GHG emissions than other countries but need also to offer compensation and even reparations for transnational harms inflicted. Meanwhile, at the global scale and in the long term, cumulative atmospheric change threatens to flip the Earth System into a new ‘basin of attraction’ that will utterly reformat the world's human and physical geography. The fabric of life will be made anew, globally yet unevenly, but scarcely under conditions of our own choosing nor under any real control, wherever we happen to be. Varied scale-specific forms of adaptation to changing and often threatening biophysical conditions will become the norm.

The fact, problem and imperative of bigness: Size is a relative dimension. The Earth is vast compared to any one person and very large indeed compared to, say, Lake Superior, Lima or Liberia. Climate change itself is obviously extremely big. It's been – is still being – caused by human activities on a vast scale. There are over 8 billion people alive; the capitalist economy has spread its tentacles everywhere, supported by all manner of multi- and bi-lateral agreements pertaining to investment, lending, labour rights, migration, product standards and trade. Humans have scaled up their endeavours decade after decade and continue to do so – for instance, an enormous pre-existing digital infrastructure has, of late, enabled the extremely rapid and poorly regulated roll-out of artificial intelligence across the globe. The enormity of the present-day human endeavour is a fact and a problem. Fifty years ago the likes of Leopold Kohr, E.F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich, Kirkpatrick Sale and Colin Ward criticised the modern penchant for largeness. Today, critics rightly call for ‘de-growth’ and a down-scaling of the human enterprise. ³ And yet the challenge of climate change also locks-in bigness in key respects. For instance, mitigation measures will need to be spread across all continents and coastal areas in order to sequester mind-boggling volumes of GHGs. The same applies to renewable energy measures. These measures will almost certainly comprise a large family of standard technologies, both nature-based and otherwise. Entrepreneurs, scientists, private investors and governments are already pouring enormous amount of time, energy and money into developing, testing and scaling these technologies. Bigness will persist, albeit different in detail to what currently prevails.

Rescaling human activity: As the previous comments indicate, responding to the climate change challenge will necessitate a mixture of down-scaling and up-scaling. There are numerous candidates for deliberate rescaling, including political decision-making, new technologies, legal rules, investment opportunities, migration agreements, commodity consumption habits, travel for work and pleasure, and trade arrangements. Scalar ‘alignment’ involves matching the scale of human practices to the scale of perceived problems and wished-for states of things. Alignment is a political, moral and practical affair. It involves reducing the amount of ‘scalar mis-match’. The struggle to institutionalise new scales of political, legal and economic practice will itself involve – is already involving – scalar practices, such as the transnational activism of Greta Thunberg, Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion and indigenous peoples. Alignment will be plural and hyper-complex, involving a myriad of overlapping but often non-isomorphic rescalings of regulations, flows (commodities, finance, people etc) and so on. Some rescaling needs to be hierarchical, but some not. A new ‘map’ of human activity needs to be drawn, with re-localisation and regionalisation central to this along with a general reduction in the sheer material output and throughput of aggregate human activity. Coordination and cross-referencing will be critical among levels, sectors and jurisdictions. How one achieves this in a capitalist world of bigness and hyper-complexity is an open question. Capitalism aside, the scale of risk posed by escalating atmospheric warming opens the door – as many have noted – to the deployment of risky ‘sunshade’ technologies at scale in order to cool the planet's surface. Key questions arise about justice in the making and execution of any future decisions to so deploy in order to ‘save humanity’ or large sections of it. In sum, rescaling will be a sine qua non of any new negotiated order, and of the unpalatable alternatives, such as autarchy, international military conflict, and so on.

Who scales? Identifying the inter-scalar actors: The literary critic Timothy Clark (2015) has noted the ‘derangements of scale’ attendant upon anthropogenic climate change. For instance, the seemingly trivial action of any one person – say, using a bag-for-life when grocery shopping – both matters and yet does not really matter at all. At the individual level, it makes a miniscule environmental difference, but as one of billions of individual acts it counts for a lot along with all the others. The same thing exists differently, as it were, depending on the scale of observation. But exactly who or what has the most power to transgress scales, who or what suffers the ill-effects of climate change, who or what ought to be held liable for harms inflicted, and who needs to act to improve things? This question speaks to the key issue of what the perceived ‘units’ of cause and impact are at the local scale – is it widely dispersed individual producers and consumers, a few hundred large private companies with multi-sited operations, the governments of powerful nations (past and present), or all of these insofar as it's a ‘systemic’ issue of ‘market failure’ or, more accurately, capitalist political economy (Hormio, 2023)? The scalar question here is analytical and ethico-political: what's the ‘grain’ we see when linking the local scale of human action to wider cross-scalar impacts? It's become a key question across a number of disciplines, such as law and sociology where climate in/justice these days looms large in the literature. What are the appropriate individual and collective actors to home-in on? How far back in time do we go to assign liabilities?

Scales of judgement and measurement: It's a truism that most human experience is ultimately local – even the economically rich are relatively place-bound in any given period. It's also true that we live in a world of socio-cultural difference, notwithstanding the forces of globalisation. Climate change inspires questions about the relative value of people, their ways of life and the places they inhabit. These questions implicate the scalar practice of judging very different yet interrelated things. For instance, how does one assess the cultural loss experienced by the Inuit due to both European colonialism and climate change and set it against the rights and duties of Canadian setters and their representatives? Or how does one properly translate global climate goals, denominated in temperatures and carbon budgets, into just national-scale measures in a world of inequality and vast social power differentials (Sadai et al., 2022)? Or how does the institution of scale-crossing carbon trading (nationally, regionally and internationally) affect those places where emissions and offsets are occurring? What selectivities and blind spots are baked-in to ways of governing and measuring climate (Machen and Nost, 2022)? Again, these questions about judgement, evaluation, commensuration and translation are being explored across several social science and humanities disciplines, though ‘scale’ is often not made explicit as an analytical lens.

Scalar dilemmas, contradictions and paradoxes: Clearly, for reasons stated above, climate change is chock-full of scalar dilemmas and tensions. The ‘best’ response to the climate change challenge varies according to the scale of interest (geographically and temporally) and whose interests are being weighed in the balance using particular evaluative scales (e.g. of distributive justice). As already noted, the act of weighing is itself a scalar practice, spatio-temporally speaking – for instance, does the standard of judgement reside in a national court or, say, a United Nations agreement, and what kind of standard it is? ⁴ Do we seek to represent future generations in our current decision making, and how? And how (well) do we speak for non-humans near and far? For Tim Clark (op. cit.) climate change instils a vertiginous loss of proportion, both analytically and affectively – he calls it ‘Anthropocene disorder’. There can be no ‘smooth’ zooming-in and zooming-out as we perceive differences, connections and render judgements about what's to be done. This situation is explored brilliantly and imaginatively in sci-fi author Liu Cixin's novel The Three Body Problem (2006/2014). The synchronic, diachronic and evaluative exist in a field of intense scalar-tension. Those willing and able to engage in the demanding task of muti-scalar ‘seeing’ can inhabit other worlds, present and future. This may allow them to rethink their own identity, interests and responsibilities.

Conclusion: Climate change in a scalar key

Clearly, climate change needs to be seen as high-dimensional phenomena, even though it's invisible to the human eye. It makes huge cognitive, normative and affective demands on us, but only if we learn to think in a truly multi-scalar way. We now live in a world of vast inter-scalar complexity. I’ve argued that an expansive sense of scale promises real perspicuity and a joining of many proverbial dots. It allows us, whoever we happen to be, to decentre ourselves and account for (be accountable to, and hold to account) others by tracing a set of extended material and moral relations of greater or shorter length. It instils sensitivity. Scale can change our sense of who we are as we engage in acts of distinguishing, differentiating and evaluating comparatively. In a climate changed world people don’t get to unthinkingly privilege their own time and place, be they powerful or more vulnerable. Operating at just one, or even, two scales is insufficient – it entraps thought and practice. Scale is both political and practical. Understood broadly, scale encourages ‘fractal’ thinking: it's a way of bringing different cognitive and normative framings of reality into a shared discursive arena. There's no avoiding perspectival clashes, and of course significant practical action needs to be taken now and soon (noting that inaction by governments and others is itself a form of action).

In closing, a quick word about criticisms of ‘scale’ as a relevant idea. As many readers will know, starting around 20 years a debate about scale quickly gained momentum in human geography wherein ‘topological’ notions of networks and assemblages were seen as preferable. In the end, this debate didn’t do away with scale – the likes of Kevin Cox, Helga Leitner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, Andy Jonas, Eric Sheppard, Erik Swyngedouw and Neil Brenner showed that these notions are not, in fact, incompatible. ⁵ I obviously concur, though note that the wider sense of scale I’m arguing for here was never really part of the geographers’ debate. This debate aside, it's also worth remembering that ‘scale’ has popular currency in English and a deep history of use, unlike academic neologisms such as actor networks and assemblages. It's range of meanings is, I’ve argued, usefully rich, and can potentially bridge across from academic to wider societal discussions of the climate challenge. We might even intuit that our predecessors were on to something by loading the one word – scale – with so much sematic baggage. Being adept at scalar thinking and practice will make a huge difference to the quality of our planetary future. Obviously, though, none of us should be holding our breath based on the dismal climate progress witnessed so far.