Cultural spaces of climate

Abstract

Climate change has become a dominant environmental narrative at the start of the twenty first century. The political and media focus on the possible implications of climate change, however, the predominantly scientific discourse in which this is couched, and the increasingly globalscale of climate thinking, have obscured the culturally specific and spatially and temporally distinctive meanings of climate more generally (Ross 1991; Hulme 2008a, b). Climate and its cultural significance have, in effect, become decoupled, and popular conceptualisations and discourses of climate, and its manifestations through local weather, have been replaced by a global, and predominantly scientific, meta-narrative. Moreover, contemporary debates over the ‘imminent’ climate threat obscure a long, complicated history of public engagement in meteorological science and changing ideas about climate. There have been different ideological and symbolic constructions of climate at different points in history and in order to better understand these distinctive meanings, it has been argued that there is a need to reintroduce particularity to the debate (Hulme 2009). Recent geographical scholarship, for example, has called for research that considers the ‘idea’ of climate as a “hybrid phenomenon” which can and should be constructed, not only through the use of meteorological statistics but also “inside the imagination”, through “sensory experiences, mental assimilation, social learning and cultural interpretations” (Hulme et al. 2009: 197), while there is a need to understanding of how different groups of people in different spatial contexts conceptualise and understand climate and its fluctuations (Hassan 2000; Adger 2003). Such work would investigate climate (and weather) as a function of personal memory, experience and intergenerational transfer of ‘climate knowledge’ (Hulme 2009: 330), and by definition, demands a more intimate spatial resolution than global perspectives can offer. Various publications have begun to focus on cultural histories of attitudes toward the weather (Jankovic 2001: Golinski 2007; Boia 2005; Anderson 2005), the myriad ways in which humans have understood the idea of climate across a range of temporal and spatial scales (Fleming et al. 2006), and the genealogy of climate change debates (Fleming 1998). Such approaches are demonstrating the importance of spatially, temporally and culturally Climatic Change (2012) 113:1–4 DOI 10.1007/s10584-012-0416-6