TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schneider, Birgit
A1  - Walsh, Lynda
T1  - The politics of zoom
T2  - Geo: Geography and Environment
N2  - Following the mandate in the Paris Agreement for signatories to provide “climate services” to their constituents, “downscaled” climate visualizations are proliferating. But the process of downscaling climate visualizations does not neutralize the political problems with their synoptic global sources—namely, their failure to empower communities to take action and their replication of neoliberal paradigms of globalization. In this study we examine these problems as they apply to interactive climate‐visualization platforms, which allow their users to localize global climate information to support local political action. By scrutinizing the political implications of the “zoom” tool from the perspective of media studies and rhetoric, we add to perspectives of cultural cartography on the issue of scaling from our fields. Namely, we break down the cinematic trope of “zooming” to reveal how it imports the political problems of synopticism to the level of individual communities. As a potential antidote to the politics of zoom, we recommend a downscaling strategy of connectivity, which associates rather than reduces situated views of climate to global ones.
KW  - climate change
KW  - climate services
KW  - climate visualization
KW  - connectivity
KW  - downscaling
KW  - spherical
KW  - synopticism
KW  - zoom
Y1  - 2019
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/42480
SN  - 2054-4049
VL  - 6
IS  - 1
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -