Future perfect climates: A phenomenological rejoinder to the performativity of climate change mitigation pathways

From charting out climate change mitigation pathways to estimating price risks associated with the social cost of carbon, as environmentally concerned citizens of the twenty-first century, we live in a culture of foresight. Because of a growing integration of an ever-wider sample space of possible climate futures into the present, historical experience has become seemingly irrelevant for effectively predicting where our climate transitions are headed, in effect restricting our sense of futurity to its performativity in the present. What has been surprisingly absent as a theoretical and methodological approach among sociologists, however, are treatments of the performativity of the future as the expression of a historical praxis for prognosis, with its own mode of disclosure. By interrogating the temporal structure of anticipation that characterizes computer-based simulations of emissions scenarios, the paper illustrates how this praxis discloses the future in accordance with the grammatical tense of the future perfect. It then argues that this relationship between past and future is the cultural product of a historically particular set of prognostic techniques and technologies, namely, model-based scenario analysis. Against this background, the paper seeks to contribute to the rehabilitation of the relevance of historical experience by historicizing the social ontological status of the future that theories of performativity take as their starting point. •When it comes to climate mitigation, our sense of futurity has become restricted to its performativity in the present.•This paper historicizes the ontological status of the future that theories of performativity take as their starting point.•It interrogates the temporal structure of anticipation that characterizes computer-based simulations of emissions scenarios.