Climate change, concept of Mike Hulme King’s College London, UK In 1966, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published a technical report on climatic [sic] change in which the statistical properties of diferent meteorological time-series data were systematically compared. Climatic change was proposed as the term to embrace all forms of climatic inconstancy on timescales longer than 10 years, irrespective of cause. Although climates were understood as changeable on all timescales, most scientiic attention was paid to past changes which had occurred on multi-century to multimillennial timescales. The favored term was “climatic change,” climatic being used as an adjective to describe this particular type of change (as opposed to, say, political or economic change). Thus the irst academic journal dedicated solely to the study of climate change was launched in 1977 with the title Climatic Change. From the 1970s onwards, understandings of climatic change began to change. There was a growing appreciation that a wide range of human activities, from energy use to food production, had the potential to alter the physical functioning of an interconnected global system. “Climate change” – a noun – now became “an issue” rather than the technical description of changing weather it had been for the WMO in 1966. It took its place in public life alongside other “issues” like global poverty, human rights, or water pollution. With the establishment of two new international institutions – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 – climate change supplanted climatic change as the dominant linguistic term. Climate change became a phenomenon caused by complex chains of human actions (and natural processes), but also an agent which could inluence far-reaching sets of material and imaginative phenomena. As this “new” idea of climate change traveled around the world, it became inscribed with multiple and complex political and cultural meanings. In this sense, the idea of climate change has never fully escaped older cultural readings of climate and its changes which have been retained in many non-Western cultures. Historical and cultural perspectives The idea of climate change – whether of natural or human origin – has a genealogy that can be traced back to Greek civilization. Not only were changes in climate discerned by Greek scholars, but these early observers were also able to trace causation to human actions in the world. For example, in the third century BCE, Aristotle’s student Theophrastus observed and documented local changes in climate induced by human agency: the clearing of forests around Philippi in Greece warmed the climate, while the draining of marshes cooled the climate around Thessaly. Non-Western cultures also had accounts of climate change, often captured in linguistic expressions for climate which combined both descriptive and causative elements of change. Thus the Inuktitut word sila or the Marshellese phrase oktak in mejatoto are both expressions which capture the enveloping climate of a place The International Encyclopedia of Geography. Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0343 CLIMATE CHANGE, CONCEPT OF and a causative account of cosmological stability or change. Western Enlightenment discourses about climate change from the seventeenth century onwards frequently turned to the efects of deforestation. For example, the historian Edward Gibbon could see the beneicial warming efects of tree-clearing, both in changes of climate through time and in diferences in climate caused by geography. In the late eighteenth century, Gibbon claimed that the “improvement” in European climate since classical times was due to the clearing of “immense woods” and he believed that contemporary forests in Canada subjected that land to a climate as ierce as that of ancient Germany. Empirical support for such understanding seemed to emerge from the land practices of colonizing Europeans in America. Within half a century of large swathes of forest being cleared along the eastern seaboard, observers were able to remark that winters had become less harsh and summers cooler. Climate had not just changed, but had been changed. The idea of climate change also occupied the imagination of European colonists in the tropics and subtropics. Here, the destruction of forests was believed to exacerbate the droughts that many settlers in the eighteenth century found endemic in subtropical regimes. Climate change was thus not only a phenomenon that humans induced in the physical world; the resulting changes in climate could also challenge the economic wellbeing of a colony and the health of its exogenous inhabitants. Climate change functioned both as an index of change, but also a putative cause of wider environmental and social change. In western cultures, the temporal horizons over which climates were believed to change were massively extended in the nineteenth century through the combined work of geologists and physicists. Huge swings in global climate 2 were implied by massive and ancient glaciations, the traces of which were newly diagnosed in the landscape by scientists such as Louis Agassiz in the 1830s. But alongside these emerging radical ideas of global climatic instability occurring over previously unimagined timescales, some observers were still grappling with the extent to which human activities could alter contemporary regional climates. The prominent Austrian geographer Eduard Brückner maintained that statistical evidence could be found for contemporaneous changes in regional climates. In the 1880s he demonstrated that average temperature and precipitation for areas of central Europe and Russia when measured over successive 35-year periods difered substantially, claiming that such changes in climate would have implications for rivers, lakes, agriculture, and human migration. Despite the work of Brückner and a few others at the time, the dominant Western view during the irst decades of the twentieth century was that climates were basically constant on timescales that mattered to human planning and action. The British climate historian Hubert Lamb was thus able to remark in 1959, “not so very long ago … climate was widely considered as something static, except on geological time scale[s], and authoritative works on the climates of various regions were written without allusion to the possibility of change” (Lamb 1959, 299). The globalization of climate change Into the 1960s, the dominant approach to understanding climate – and hence climate change – remained through the comparative analysis of meteorological statistics. The WMO’s technical report on climatic change published in 1966 (WMO 1966), systematically compared the statistical properties of diferent meteorological time series data. Climatic change was deined CLIMATE CHANGE, CONCEPT OF as “all forms of climatic inconstancy, regardless of their statistical nature (or physical causes),” although inconstancies over less than a decade in length were to be regarded as climatic variations. Thus climatic change encompassed climate periodicities (regular and irregular), luctuations, oscillations, vacillations, discontinuities, and trends. With few exceptions, most scientiic attention and public interest at the time was paid to (natural) worldwide changes which had occurred in the distant past on multi-century to multi-millennial timescales. Climatic change that originated through human activities and which occurred on the timescales of human generations was conined to local and regional scales. The preconditions for a new understanding of global climate change began to emerge in the 1960s, as evidenced in a joint UNESCO/WMO symposium on changes in climate held in Paris in 1963. First, a few scholars such as Hubert Lamb in the United Kingdom and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in France began publishing accounts of historical climate change based on long climatic reconstructions derived from documentary and environmental evidence. Lamb in particular helped to popularize the notion of a Medieval Warm Epoch (in the late Middle Ages) and a Little Ice Age (in the early Modern period) – both of which were imagined to be hemispheric, if not global, in reach (Lamb 1966). Second, new developments in scientiic monitoring of the planet, boosted by the International Geophysical Year in 1957/1958 and by new satellite technologies, prompted a new conception of climate as an interconnected system of atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, and cryosphere. Local and regional understandings of climate largely gave way to global understandings, facilitated by early computer simulation models of the newly imagined “Earth system.” This opened the way for numerical experimentation using these models through which the global climatic efects of volcanoes, sunspots, carbon dioxide and, later, nuclear explosions could be safely simulated. Third, this idea of a human-induced change in global climate found sympathy in the broader currents of intellectual thought of the 1960s and 1970s. The emergence of a new environmentalism focused attention on the planetary scale efects of human activities on the physical world. One of the irst associations of anthropogenic climate change with notions of danger was in a 1963 conference of scientists convened by the Conservation Foundation of New York which warned of a “potentially dangerous atmospheric increase of carbon dioxide.” And the irst governmental and international assessments of the prospects of climate change were conducted during this period. In the United States for example, the President’s Scientiic Advisory Committee in 1965 published a report on “Restoring the Quality of our Environment,” which included a speciic section on “the climatic efects of pollution.” The possibilities of changes to the “global climate system” – driven by human activities – therefore began to be articulated. The irst use in a scientiic journal of the term “global warming” occurred in June 1971 (Russell and Landsberg 1971) and a major focus of the WMO’s First World Climate Conference in 1979 was on climate change. During the “greenhouse summer of 1988” the idea of anthropogenic climate change – commonly depicted as the enhanced greenhouse efect – penetrated deeply into popular culture in the West, although more supericially or not at all in other parts of the world. The growing political resonance of climate change was partly explained by the dissolution of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991. Fears of Cold War destruction were displaced by those associated with climate change, prompting the observation at the time from cultural theorist Andrew Ross that, “apocalyptic 3 CLIMATE CHANGE, CONCEPT OF fears about widespread droughts and melting ice caps have displaced the nuclear threat as the dominant feared meteorological disaster” (Ross 1991, 8). The evolving scientiic deinition of climate change can be discerned through successive assessment reports of the IPCC. In its First Assessment Report in 1990, no very precise definition of climate change was ofered, although it was stated that the “climate change we are addressing in this report is that which may occur over the next century as a result of human activities” (IPCC 1990, xxxvi). In fact the report discussed both natural and human changes in climate. A few years later, the Second Assessment Report was more explicit. Climate change meant “climate luctuations of a global nature … and which includes the efects due to human actions … and those due to natural causes” (IPCC 1996, 56). By 2001 the IPCC had settled on a deinition which also prevailed for its Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports: “Climate change refers to statistically signiicant variation in either the mean state of climate or its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer). Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use” (IPCC 2001, 788). While the IPCC understood climate change to embrace both natural and human causes, for the UNFCCC – signed in 1992 – climate change was to mean “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.” The contrasting deinitions between these scientiic and political usages have resulted in considerable strategic ambiguity in the public meaning of climate change. 4 Meanings, imperatives, and language Since the 1960s, climate change has moved from being a technical description of a physical phenomenon (climatic change) to becoming a political (i.e., a contested) issue. Thus, each December since 1995 has witnessed a two week meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COPs) to the UNFCCC, where politicians, diplomats, business leaders, and civil society organizations have gathered to negotiate political responses to climate change. Further evidence of this shift includes how some government ministries have been reconstituted around climate change. For example, since 2008 the United Kingdom has had a Department of Energy and Climate Change, while in 2010 the European Union appointed its irst Commissioner for Climate Change Action. At the most generic level climate change now acts as a synecdoche for the collective impacts of humanity on the physical process and sustainability of the Earth. This reading of climate change has helped give rise to the idea of the Anthropocene, a new geological era which marks the global impact of human activities on the Earth’s ecosystems. But as the idea of climate change has traveled around the world through scientiic, political, and civic networks it has become inscribed with complex meanings each carrying diferent local resonances. It is not possible to view climate change “from nowhere.” Contrasting accounts of climate change ofer diferent interpretations of cause, signiicance, and responsibility, even while anchoring the idea of climate change in the changing weather attributes of the climate system. Thus Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General describes climate change as “the deining challenge of our age … the time to act is now,” while the economist Lord Nicholas Stern describes it as “the greatest example of market failure the world CLIMATE CHANGE, CONCEPT OF has seen.” Contrasting meanings can be found in the work of ethicists and anthropologists. So theologian Michael Northcott sees climate change as “the Earth’s judgement on the global market Empire and the heedless consumption that it fosters” and cultural anthropologist Jerry Jacka, writing of the Porgeran tribe in Papua New Guinea, explains climate change as “due to societal breakdown between [the Porgerans] and the rituals oriented toward powerful spirits that control the cosmos.” The proliferation of linguistic terms used to express the idea of climate change lends further variety to these multiple meanings. With climate change (noun) having replaced climatic (adjective) change it became necessary to describe what sort of climate change the world was facing. Climate change is therefore described as natural, anthropogenic, and/or human-induced. It is portrayed as gradual or rapid, smooth, or abrupt (see Table 1). For example, the term “climate catastrophe” irst appeared in the context of anthropogenic climate change in the German language in the cultural magazine Der Spiegel in April 1986. The phrase “catastrophic climate change” (Klimakatastrophe) continues to be used to deliberate efect in certain discourses. And other linguistic entrepreneurs have sought to ind more persuasive formulations than the dominant expression “climate change.” So “global warming,” “weather weirding,” “the climate crisis,” “global heating,” and “climate disruption” have all been used as alternative, more vivid, descriptions of the idea of anthropogenic climate change. The future of climate change There are few issues in the world today that can match the salience and cultural reach of climate change. Books dealing with climate change now Table 1 Prevalence of terms used to refer to climate change: number of Internet page hits using Google (February 2014). Expression Number of Internet page hits (millions) “Climate change” 873 “Global warming” “Rapid climate change” 267 58 “Catastrophic climate change” “Climatic change” 30 13 “Human-induced climate change” “Greenhouse efect” 11 10 “Anthropogenic climate change” “Gradual climate change” “Anthropogenic global warming” 7 6 4 “Abrupt climate change” “Enhanced greenhouse efect” 2 1 appear at the rate of more than one a day in the English language alone, compared to less than one a week a generation ago. They cover topics such as climate change and architecture, diet, football fans, gender, theology, visual art, time, forests, justice, democracy, disasters, trust, law, aviation, migration, and capitalism. Not only is the reality of climate change contested, but so too are its causes, consequences, and meanings. Climate change today therefore needs to be understood as an emergent phenomenon that is simultaneously a physical transformation of the climate system and an evolving cultural symbol. The insights of anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, literary critics, historians, theologians, and philosophers are needed to do justice to the idea of climate change, as much as those coming from natural and physical scientists. All of human life is now lived out not just in the presence of a physically changing climate, 5 CLIMATE CHANGE, CONCEPT OF but in the new discursive and cultural spaces that have been created by the idea of climate change. Most human practices and disputes can now be expressed through the language and symbolism of climate change. Thus photography, music, cartoons, literature, theater, poetry, dance, religious practice, architecture, educational curricula, personal identity, politics, and so on, use climate change as a medium of expression. And disputes about lood management, landscape aesthetics, child procreation and child rearing, trade tarifs, development aid, industrial patents, social justice, taxation, even democracy itself, are formulated in the language and argumentative spaces of climate change. As suggested by the eco-critic Greg Garrard, we “feel there might not be any narrative whose meaning we cannot re-evaluate in relation to climate change” (Garrard 2013, 183). Climate change has become a new condition through which human life now takes shape. SEE ALSO: Climate policy; Global climate change; Global environmental change: human dimensions; Globalization; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) References Garrard, Greg. 2013. “The Unbearable Lightness of Green: Air Travel, Climate Change and Literature.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 17(2): 175–188. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 1990. Climate Change: The IPCC Scientiic Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 6 IPCC. 1996. Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. IPCC. 2001. Climate Change 2001: The Scientiic Basis. Contribution of WG1 to the IPCC Third Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamb, Hubert H. 1959. “Our Changing Climate, Past and Present.” Weather, 14: 299–318. Lamb, Hubert H. 1966. “Climate in the 1960s.” The Geographical Journal, 132: 183–212. Ross, Andrew. 1991. “Is Global Culture Warming up?” Social Text, 28: 3–30. Russell, Cliford S., and Hans H. Landsberg. 1971. “International Environmental Problems – a Taxonomy.” Science, 172: 1307–1314. World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 1966. Climatic Change: Report of a Working Group of the Commission for Climatology. Technical note No. 79. Geneva: WMO. Further reading Bärring, Lars. 1993. “Climate – Change or Variation?” Climatic Change, 25: 1–13. Dove, Michael R. 2014. “Perspectives on Contemporary Climate Change Debates from Historic Anthropological Work: The Long View From the Vedic Sages to Montesquieu and Beyond.” In Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change, edited by Jessica Barnes and Michael Dove. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fleming, James R. 2005. Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.