Abstract
Climatic events express the dynamics of the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, but are profoundly personal and social in their impacts, representation and comprehension. This paper explores how knowledge of the climate has multiple scales and dimensions that intersect in our experience of the climate. The climate is objective and subjective, scientific and cultural, local and global, and personal and political. These divergent dimensions of the climate frame the philosophical and cultural challenges of a dynamic climate. Drawing on research into the adaptation in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin, this paper outlines the significance of understanding the cultural dimensions of the changing climate. This paper argues for greater recognition of the ways in which cultures co-create the climate and, therefore, that the climate needs to be recognised as a socio-natural hybrid. Given the climate’s hybrid nature, research should aim to integrate our understanding of the social and the natural dimensions of our relationships to a changing climate.
Highlights
Change? Climate 2021, 9, 63. https://Each time we take in information about the weather from forecasts delivered via television, radio, the press, books, posters or the Internet, we are receiving the product of an extraordinary cooperative, international effort to understand the Earth’s systems and their dynamics, which frame our understanding of the world [1]
The extensive international literature on climate adaptation is used [1,2,16,17]. This examination of cultural dimensions of climate proposes that critical realism offers ways to integrate natural and social science in understanding society [18]
A reliance on climate science to shape bold reforms in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) would have signalled to the Australian public, including many conservative rural voters, that the government accepted the reality of climate change and the need for decisive adaptation policies
Summary
This section aims to expand on this paper’s central idea—that the climate is a socionatural hybrid and that all cultures are in constant processes of negotiation and coconstruction with their climates. These negotiations must accelerate with climate change, as the relatively stable conditions experienced over the past ten thousand years change into a climate that is increasingly unstable. This section outlines how cultures negotiate with the climate, arguing that ‘climate normal’ and climate change are both culturally constructed. It sets out that research approaches are needed to develop an integrated understanding of how cultures co-produce the climate
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