Former creative resistance to environmentally hazardous activities has during the last decades, through discussions on climate change, been increasingly reoriented by meteorology, expert knowledge and policy discourse. The ecological system’s perspective on climate change, proclaiming the human not simply as a disturbance in a natural balancing system, but as changing it, has become a causal model for the possibility to change that human. This PhD thesis interrogates how statements in IPCC reports and a Swedish newspaper (DN) constitute truth claims on climate change. What subjectivities does parlance on climate change produce and what type of citizen is called upon to optimize vitality in relation to atmospheric molecules? How is self-management of every-day activities established by help to interactivity and self-techniques framed by technical artefacts? These questions are addressed by a governmentality perspective on how discourse, conceived as partaking in a process of productive power, strives to make climate change an ethico-politic question that fosters ‘Homo Clima’, climate man. What strategies and techniques this form of ‘government’ deploys are described by six interconnecting themes; “Atmospheric biopolitics fosters contingency”, “Mortality/Vitality”, “The moral population in the atmosphere moral economy”, “Homo Clima” and “Bioaesthetics through technical artefacts”, ending in a discussion upon these themes as an act which “Re-thematizes climate change”. The chapters illustrate how statements on the prevention and mitigation of climate risks mold scientific rationalities, mathematically modelled futures and calculations of molecular compounds with how these same futures and molecules correlate to individual culpability, responsibility and morality. From Foucauldian biopolitics to Foucauldian ethics, this can be conceived as an optimization of the vitality of the population by inserting the idea of the population as moral into history and foster moral en masse . Homo Clima is in line with this power/knowledge regime investigated, regarding his ambitions and receptiveness to adapt into a self-governing communicative ethico-politically active neoliberal subject, predicted to inhabit a not yet fully flourished relation between its climate moral self and its actions. By statements in the perimeter of technical artefacts, death, reproduction and consumption, Homo Clima is to become an ideal citizen, investing its own changeability in relation to those beings that are investigated, mapped, localized, archived, systematized and segmented; to simultaneously amend and protect a climate authorized aesthetizised life. This formation, together with the atmosphere as a new terrain for ‘government’ with market solutions for climate risks that links vitalisation with individual morality to moral at an aggregate level, offers an ostensible confrontation of the enterprising subject in the advanced liberal society. Homo Clima is thus conceptualized as a relay of bioaesthetics rather than as a protector of the environment. 
Diss. Uppsala : Uppsala universitet, 2011