I recently encountered an article which helped me think about my research in a more environmental studies way. In Hulme’s Cosmopolitan Climates Hybridity, Foresight and Meaning, he talks about how local/global and nature/culture are evident in the discipline of meteorology and climatology. One really cool thing about this article is the section of the entanglement of climate and weather, which is sort of what I am going for with my thesis. It starts with the conceptions of the meteorology and then climatology and then talk about how these two intersect, specifically using the example of clouds. Hulme says that weather and climate are inseparable and cross boundaries of local/global as well as nature/culture.
Below, I have noted a few passages that struck me as particularly useful.
‘There is no longer such a thing as a purely natural weather event. Equally, no weather event can truly be described as artificial (i.e. human-induced). By changing so substantially the composition of the world’s atmosphere, humans have not simply brought a new category of weather into being – ‘human weather’, for example, as distinct from ‘natural weather’. Rather, the planetary system which yields distinct weather at distinct times in distinct places is now a changed system; it is a hybrid system yielding hybrid weather” (269)
“Sitting at the heart of most debates about climate change is a problematic tension between the assumed predictability of the climatic future and the necessary openness and malleability of the social future. On the one hand, climate science offers plausible, maybe robust, predictions of the future evolution of climate and of its apparent consequences for future society and ecology. On the other hand, our poets, visionaries and sociologists tell us the future can only be imagined or invented, certainly not predicted.” (270-271)
“cosmopolitan view of climate change will recognize that our future foresight – and hence our future – is as conditioned by the hopes and fears emerging from the present as it is revealed inside the electronics of a computer model.” 272
“Our experience of weather and climate is increasingly cosmopolitan; it is losing its place-based character.” (272)
“As weather measurements became standardized and the new meteorological science of the 19th century took shape, weather became domesticated and rationalized. New national climate identities were invented and commercial climate prospecting became possible. The globalizing of climate culminated in the 1970s and 1980s with new conceptions of how climate worked and what processes were altering it ” (272)
“The scientific narrative of global climate change – and its regional manifestations – thus becomes entangled with the irrepressible personal experiences of local weather, whether these be traditionally proximate and sensuous experiences or newly vicarious and manufactured ones.” (273)