The cultural politics of climate change has always relied on images, most notably the “hockey stick” graphs of changing global temperature over the last thousand years (Schneider and Nocke 2014). Geoengineering—the proposed, deliberate, large-scale technological intervention into climate processes to counteract global warming—has also developed its own visual aesthetic. Geoengineering is climate promise, hope, absolution; but it is also the weirdest of technologies: one that takes the whole planet as its object, that is impossible to really test before deployment, and that would be wielded not from without but from within (Macnaghten and Szerszynski 2013). It is thus perhaps not surprising that proponents deploy schematic and cutaway graphics that in their very visual style seem to promise objectivity and feasibility (Schrickel 2014).
But now we have this book from Design Earth, an architectural research practice founded in 2010 by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, associate professors...