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The 1.5°C target is now widely considered as the maximum acceptable limit for global warming. However, it is at once recent and, as it appears increasingly unreachable, already almost obsolete. Adopted as an aspirational target in the Paris Agreement in 2015, the 1.5°C objective originated with a political impetus within UNFCCC negotiations. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) endorsed this policy‐driven target when it produced the Special Report on 1.5°C. This article highlights the continuity of the history of the 1.5°C target with that of the 2°C target, but also the differences between the two. Because the 1.5°C target considerably raises the bar on mitigation efforts, it exacerbates political tensions and ambiguities that were already latent in the 2°C target. This article retraces the emergence of the 1.5°C in diplomatic negotiations, the preparation of the IPCC Special report on 1.5°C, and the new kinds of debates they provoked among climate scientists and experts. To explain how an unreachable target became the reference for climate action, we analyze the "political calibration" of climate science and politics, which can also be described as a codependency between climate science and politics. This article is categorized under:Integrated Assessment of Climate Change > Integrated Assessment ModelingClimate, History, Society, Culture > World Historical PerspectivesAssessing Impacts of Climate Change > Evaluating Future Impacts of Climate Change [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the World2 and World3 models to contemporary Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that model carbon neutral emission pathways, global computer models have served as virtual laboratories for addressing economic, environmental and technological concerns together. Representing technological change has been a controversial element of global modelling efforts because, to a great extent, it sets the parameters on conceivable futures. To retrace this history, this article analyses four moments when modellers debated technological change: the controversy spurred by The Limits to Growth in the 1970s; subsequent global future studies during that decade; the IIASA Energy in a Finite World study in the 1980s; and the shift to endogenous technological change in IAMs in the 2000s. It shows that the notion of technological change as a predictable parameter affecting the future of society was not a given. Technological change progressively became a parameter in models as more elaborate methodologies were developed to simulate it. When modellers began to focus on climate action in the 1990s and 2000s, their interest in the relationship between technological change and social change dwindled. The increasing skill with which modellers formally represented technological dynamics was commensurate to the decline of heated discussions over how conflicting worldviews shaped simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is objectivity accomplished in laboratory economic experiments? To address this question, this paper focuses on a modest and mundane thing: the written instructions that guide experimental subjects in the lab. In a material-semiotic perspective, these instructions can be understood as text-devices. We follow text-devices 'on the move' from their very writing, through the lab, the review process and out into the journal article. To do so, we analyse 'text-author ensembles', which are journal articles together with practice-oriented interviews with their authors. We show that instructions act not simply as texts, but as experimental instruments that also perform the procedure of experimental economics. They draw together the procedural, material and rhetorical dimensions of experimental work in economics, and link the lab setting to collective validation procedures within the discipline of economics. To achieve this, experimental economists rely on qualitative writing skills refined in collective writing and reviewing practices. These text-devices 'on the move' alert us not only to the role of writing and writing skills in the production of scientific knowledge, but to the role of texts as material and semiotic objects that can produce facts as well as labs and disciplines, and that are key to the accomplishment of objectivity in experimental economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social studies of science have for many years analyzed and demonstrated the key role of experiments to science and the making of facts. But what is the role of experiments in market work? And what, if anything, can we learn from them about markets and commodities? It is perhaps tempting to say that we can learn very little. This paper investigates a series of market research experiments investigating consumers' valuations of farmed fish, and these are almost comical in their painstaking attention to mundane details. However, when looked into closely, they provide key insights into commodification processes and the scholarly literature to understand them. Most importantly, their analysis allows us to grasp how commodities do not simply emerge as the outcome of a one way process directed towards the market, but through a relational process that jointly works with and acts upon things and people, markets and production. The paper works with the notion of co-modification to trace and stay close to these relational processes. In doing this the paper simultaneously strives for an approach that is not framed by the dominant conceptual distinction between production and market, but instead directed towards the materiality and activeness of the things exchanged. The notion of co-modification emphasises that there is more to market that the human hand. The paper shows that it can also be used in a stronger sense to suggest that commodification is a process where things, people, production methods and markets are actively modifying one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greenhouse gas emission scenarios are key to analyse of human interference with the climate system. They are mainly produced by one category of computer models: Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). We analyse how IAM research organised into a community around the production of socio-economic scenarios during the preparation of the IPCC AR5 (2005-2014). We seek to describe the co-emergence of a research community, its instruments, and its domain of applicability. We highlight the role of the IPCC process in the making of the IAM community, showing how IAMs worked their way to an influent position. We then survey three elements of the repertoire that served to organise collective work on scenarios in interaction with the IPCC and the European Union, and which now frames the community and its epistemic practices. This repertoire needs to articulate epistemic practices with the pursuit of policy relevance, which shows how epistemic communities and patterns of co-production materialise in practical arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on a successful local photovoltaic project in France, this paper retraces the emergence and constitution of a territorial capacity to take part in the development of renewable energy as driven by a private actor (an agricultural cooperative) that relied on the combination of policy support, of a tradition of mutualisation, and of its territorial implantation. A relational perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship is adopted to describe the various entanglements that hold this project together. The development of a local renewable energy project and its community is seen as a collective endeavour that requires to establish and consolidate relationships between people and things; relationships are negotiated, tested and shaped through series of trials. I pay particular attention to the material and cognitive devices that are used to articulate the market policy framework and the territory (understood as a geographical, patrimonial and social entity), particularly by organising mutualisation. This enables me to explore how supporting policies and the territory are mobilised and enacted in the course of the project, and the extent to which both are transformed in the process. Supporting policies are turned into a tool for territorial innovation and development, while the tradition of territorial mutualisation that is constitutive of the cooperative that promoted the project becomes a way to provide access to a market and to maximise and redistribute associated profits. This highlights the entanglements through which a specific conception of equity is enacted in a project, and redistributive concerns are incorporated into an economics-centred policy device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of renewable energy is one manifestation of current transformations in the organisation of European energy production and markets. To illuminate the changes triggered by renewable energy policy, the evolution of solar photovoltaic policy in France is analysed with a focus on its central instrument, feed-in tariffs (FITs). FITs for photovoltaics raised difficulties in many countries, but their effects were particularly dramatic in France. Market sociology and science and technology studies are employed to describe FITs as agencements organising the markets and politics of electricity production. FITs are considered as inherently unpredictable insofar as they encourage innovation and the emergence of new actors. The ways in which three successive agencements of FITs for photovoltaics framed the politics and economy of photovoltaics in France, and how they addressed unanticipated effects, are discussed. This is suggestive of transformations and tensions in the construction of French energy policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]