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Paper short abstract

Digital twins such as Destination Earth turn climate modeling into future-making. Through storyline simulations, they collapse prediction and intervention into a single equation, rendering planetary futures actionable in the present and reshaping how they are known and governed.

Paper long abstract

Digital twins are real-time models of material systems, simulating their behavior under specific conditions.Through a bidirectional data flow, the results are used to modify the "material" twin, enforcing or preventing projected futures, creating "a continuum between the physical and virtual worlds" (Crespi et al. 2023, 8).

Initially developed in manufacturing, digital twins now scale to planetary dimensions. The most ambitious example is Destination Earth (DestinE), an EU-funded project developing digital twins for climate change adaptation. Here, storyline simulations replay past weather events under alternative climate conditions, generating scenarios meant to inform interventions into planetary processes.

Scaled to the planet, however, the concept breaks: there is no material original to place alongside the model, and thus no site at which a computed future could be played back into its object.

I argue that the twinning does not disappear but migrates into the model: what is passed back and forth is no longer model and original, but two internal versions of the same object. Its atmospheric model holds the Earth in two untranslatable representations: spectral space, which has waves but no places, and grid-point space, which has places but no waves.This division is what makes counterfactual climate experiments possible. Prediction and intervention share one equation, differing only by a relaxation term.

To develop this, I analyze storyline simulations within DestinE's Climate Digital Twin, based on documentation and interviews at ECMWF. Understanding digital twins through "operational images" (Parikka 2023) and "operational analysis" (Friedrich/Hoel 2023), I examine how future-making is enacted through technical operations.