The Cultural Functions of Climate | Mike Hulme

SUMMARY
The idea of climate should be understood as performing important psychological and cultural functions. Climate offers a way of navigating between the human experience of a constantly changing atmosphere and its attendant insecurities, and the need to live with a sense of stability and regularity. This is what Nico Stehr refers to as ‘trust in climate’. People look to the idea of climate to offer an ordered container - a sensory, imaginative, linguistic or numerical repertoire - through which to tame and interpret the unsettling arbitrariness of the restless weather. This container creates Lorraine Daston’s ‘well-ordered foundations without which the world of causes and promises falls apart’. Climate may be defined according to the aggregated statistics of weather in places or as a scientific description of an interacting physical system. Climate may also be apprehended more intuitively, as a tacit idea held in the human mind or in social memory of what the weather of a place ‘should be’ at a certain time of year. But however defined, formally or tacitly, it is the human sense of climate that establishes certain expectations about the atmosphere’s performance. The idea of climate cultivates the possibility of a stable psychological life and of meaningful human action in the world. Put simply, climate allows humans to live culturally with their weather. In this talk I will offer evidence for this argument, drawing upon anthropological, historical and geographical work from around the world. I will also reflect briefly on what the unsettling phenomenon and discourse of climate-change means for the future cultural value of the idea of climate.
SPEAKER: Mike Hulme
• Joined the Department at Cambridge in September 2017, following a period of four years as professor of climate and culture in the Department of Geography at King's College London where he was Head of Department. • From 2000 to 2007 he was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a multi-institutional and inter-disciplinary research centre based at the University of East Anglia (UEA).
• For 12 years prior to establishing the Tyndall Centre, Hulme worked in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at UEA and had the dubious honour of having five years' worth of his professional email correspondence released to public scrutiny as a result of the Climategate controversy.
• While in CRU, Hulme specialised in the compilation and analysis of global climate datasets and the construction and application of climate change scenarios for impact, adaptation and integrated assessment.
• He led the preparation of a series of climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government and in 2007 he received a personalised certificate from the Nobel Peace Prize committee in recognition of his 'significant contribution' to the work of the United Nations' IPCC.
• Hulme continues as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change, with a journal impact factor of 4.6.
SLIDES: "The Cultural Functions of Climate"
www.mikehulme....
BOOK: " Weathered: Cultures of Climate "
uk.sagepub.com...
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