Climate Change, Concept of

Abstract

Like all powerful ideas, climate change can be deceptively simple to define and yet subject to a multiplicity of cultural meanings and technical interpretations. Most cultures have evolved mythological accounts to explain the vicissitudes of climate, while the newly quantitative climatologists from the nineteenth century onwards developed various statistical definitions of climatic change. But since the 1980s, and emerging out of Western scientific culture, the idea of climate change took on new meaning. Rather than a sign of moral judgment by the gods or a change in the statistics of local or regional weather, climate change came to stand for a more nebulous idea – the growing influence of human actions on physical processes operating at a global scale. In the early decades of the twenty‐first century, climate change has become an idea that offers new imaginaries, a new language and new institutions through which the complexities, interdependencies, and dilemmas of human life are acted out.