When the planet won’t follow your models, model a new planet.

Our new paper published in WIRES Climate Change questions the logic and the opportunity costs of building a digital replica of the planet — inclusive of its human population. These-much hyped projects — such as Destination Earth in Europe (DestinE), and similar initiatives in the US and elsewhere — are rapidly being implemented with no serious discussion or debate of how these efforts look through the lenses of system ecology, sociology and political sciences. Better and more equitable use can be made of scarce research resources.[…]

Models exist in a state of exception, having appropriated the academic prestige of mathematics and physics while at the same time escaping the critical gaze of philosophers and social scientists, including to some extent that of the sociologists of quantification. We reached this conclusion by comparing work on mathematical models with what sociologists say about quantification in statistics, economics, algorithms and artificial intelligence.

According to our analysis, modellers have acquired a central position at the heart of the climate change discussion, and make use of this privileged state to increase their political standing and funding, putting themselves at the helm of the climate change narratives and making climate change itself into an all-encompassing meta-narrative, subsuming all ailments of humans and their planet, inclusive of wars, authoritarianism, migrations, and various forms of aggression to planetary ecosystems.

The project of digital twins represents the pinnacle of this movement.