Accessing the glocality of climate change: A cognitive fallacy

Abstract

This essay addresses some methodological biases present in the mode of knowing the changing weather through scientific research. These biases are coined with the concept of glocality. The paper argues that as a device of the
cognitive globalisation around environmental issues, glocality operates in science as a cognitive form of ubiquity deriving from an attempt to compress the spatiotemporal dimension of the changing weather within the time and
space of the mind. In the case of climate change, it refers to three focal points summarised as problems of climate change’s phenomena, problem of the ontologies of climate change’s phenomena and problem of the logics of
climate change’s phenomena. The intersections between these three problems show how blurry are the frontiers between scientific knowledge and political power.