WEATHER AND CLIMATE AS EVENTS: CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PUBLIC IDEA OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Abstract

One aspect of the psychology of weather and climate concerns the multiple meanings that may be associated with weather and climate as event. Atmospheric scientists and journalists have increasingly described both weather and climate as event. In this paper, the authors documented the increasing use of weather and climate as events in the scholarly literature of the American Meteorological Society and in newspaper articles over time. The authors also conducted pathfinder network scaling analyses with event-related terms to assess the meanings of events in academic and journalistic writing. The analyses suggested four contexts of event meanings: (1) study of ordinary weather or climate occurrences, (2) the study and attribution of severe and extreme weather, (3) societal impacts of weather, and (4) the public lexicon. Communicating about weather and climates as event contributes to the development and evolution of the public idea of climate change. The burgeoning of event in discourse contributes to the public idea of climate change in at least three ways: (1) events contribute specificity to the more general idea of climate change; (2) events contribute experientiality of climate change, and (3) events contribute exemplification to the public idea of climate change to the extent that weather events can be attributed to climate change.