Introduction

While sudden ‘natural’ disasters demand attention, the cumulative and ongoing impacts of disasters – including saltwater incursions, species loss, ocean acidification and the reduction of sea ice – are slow planetary changes scientifically monitored, yet paradoxically overlooked within western capitalist logics of development and progress. Rather than raising public consciousness of climate change, slow changes easily overlooked by powerful nation states strengthen narratives of climate denialism and scepticism even though there are authoritative reports and global agreements. Contemporary research shows the emergence of polarised debates on climate change that have limited global response and action, privileged narrow understandings of scientific progress and even denied scientific findings all together (Stengers, 2011; Castree, 2017; Connolly, 2017; Freestone, 2018). While there are scientific facts to support discourses of climate change, this ‘inconvenient truth’ has ‘failed to sell’ (Freestone, 2018). In the policy arena, stories of slow changes can be easily associated with ‘marketing spin, PR, propaganda or lies’ (Freestone, 2018) especially when the long- term effects that use the language of ‘extinction’ are not immediately visible or felt. But such a short-sighted approach that continues to support capitalist logics of development and extractive energy futures is tested every time there are extreme weather events or catastrophes. In this chapter we attempt to respond to scholarly calls for fresh and different approaches to climate and environmental knowledge, through a focus on the visceral practice of listening to the unthought. This is the ‘unthought’ that is attentive to the affective intensities of matter (that, in this chapter, is the example of sea ice) that is ‘above and beyond life’ and decentres the liberal human subject (Yusoff, 2017). This chapter also responds to Noel Castree's (2017) call for stronger relationships between the geosciences, social sciences and humanities that moves beyond ‘ignorance, timidity and distance’ (2017: 56– 7) and engages with the public in ways that shift the global discourse on environmental change. We take up these challenges in light of the plea made by Isabelle Stengers and Stephen Muecke (2018) for a ‘slow science’ that moves beyond objectivity and is open to messiness and speculative thinking.