Climate and its changes: a cultural appraisal

Abstract

Geographers and Geography has long been acquainted with the idea of climate. For much of the last century, climatology was one of the canonical sub‐fields of physical geography and interactions between climate and the human world have proved fruitful sites of geographical inquiry. Although much contemporary scholarship and applied science is concerned with the idea of climate change , I believe there is important work still to be done on enriching the idea of climate. The argument put forward in this essay is that climate – as it is imagined and acted upon – needs to be understood, first and foremost, culturally. Rather than framing climate as an interconnected global physical system or as a statistical artefact of weather measurements, climate should be understood equally as an idea that takes shape in cultures and can therefore be changed by cultures. Climate has a cultural history, which is interwoven with its physical history. It is a history which forms the substrate out of which today's beliefs, claims and disputes about climate change emerge. This essay develops two core arguments. First, climate can be understood culturally, as an idea that humans use to stabilise relationships between weather and their patterned lives. In its various manifestations around the world, the idea of climate enables humans to live with their weather through a widening and changing range of cultural resources, practices, artefacts and rituals. Second, I argue that such a cultural understanding of climate alters the way the contemporary idea of climate change should be conceived; not primarily as a physical process which must be stopped, but as the latest stage in the cultural evolution of the idea of climate.

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