Climate is an enduring idea of the human mind and also a powerful one. Today, the idea of climate is most commonly associated with the discourse of climate-change and its scientific, political, economic, social, religious and ethical dimensions. However, to understand adequately the cultural politics of climate-change it is important to establish the different origins of the idea of climate itself and the range of historical, political and cultural work that the idea of climate accomplishes.

In Weathered: Cultures of Climate, distinguished professor Mike Hulme opens up the many ways in which the idea of climate is given shape and meaning in different human cultures - how climates are historicized, known, changed, lived with, blamed, feared, represented, predicted, governed and, at least putatively, re-designed.

About the Author
Mike Hulme is professor of climate and culture in the Department of Geography at King's College London. His work sits at the intersection of climate, history and culture. He studies how knowledge about climate and its changes is made and represented and analyses the numerous ways in which the idea of climate-change is deployed in public discourse around the world. His previous books include Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering (Polity, 2014), Exploring Climate Change Through Science and In Society (Routledge, 2013) and Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge, 2009). This latter book was chosen by The Economist magazine as one of its science and technology books of the year. From 2000 to 2007 he was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, based at the University of East Anglia, and since 2007 has been the founding Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change. He is currently Head of Department.

Reviews

Mike Hulme's wise and well-crafted book encircles the idea of climate from a series of perspectives, showing its elusive nature from a welter of examples. As the argument develops, we see how climate is embedded in multiple cultures, histories, and knowledges about nature. We are shown how our views of climate depend on personal experiences, scientific models, inherited tropes, and political interest. Each chapter reflects a turn of the kaleidoscope, gradually making the reader see both the complexity and the singularity of each image. Hulme's remarkable achievement is to humanise climate, without losing sight of the larger challenges; this is where the book cannot but affect the reader.

-- Kirsten Hastrup
Everybody may be talking about the weather, but how do we experience climate? While climate has mostly been left to the natural sciences, Mike Hulme's book shows how climate is much more than the average weather". It is a cultural relationship between humans and the weathers they dwell in. How do cultures live with the weather? How does the experience of climate structure our sense of space and time? This book is the first to offer a systematic overview of the many forms of knowledge, cultural practices and personal attitudes that helped humans in different epochs and locations deal with their meteorological environment. Its importance lies not just in the wealth of material and its brilliantly clear structure but also in the way Hulme links a humanities-based approach to climate with the current state of climate science. This is a milestone for interdisciplinary climate research and a must-read for all scholars and students trying to understand how a human being-in-the-world is a being-in-climate.
-- Eva Horn

We desperately need a book like this one, a book that reorients our thinking about climate change from temperature and precipitation to culture, values, emotions, and social justice. Mike Hulme has delivered beautifully in this highly accessible, boldly insightful, and elegant book. Weathered divulges quite clearly the complex ways we think about weather and climate. And it also shows us that when we define or explain, study or represent, fear or blame, engineer or predict the climate, we are ultimately empowering some people while disempowering others. Anyone who cares about climate-from climate scientists and policymakers to journalists, geographers, historians, students, and activists-should read this book.

-- Mark Carey

In his bracing new book, Mike Hulme throws open cultural windows on climate, illuminating its history and geography as a powerful form of human experience and imagination. Through a series of frameworks, concerning knowledge, narrative, livelihood and policy, and a rich range of examples, from scientific modelling to impressionist painting, statistical mapping to song and dance, Hulme guides his readers, clearly and accessibly, through the cultural worlds of climate. Weathered introduces students from many subjects to the many meanings and functions of climate, and its relations to such matters as commerce and creativity. The book also challenges scholars in many fields of science and the humanities to see beyond their specialisms, in such a pressing field of inquiry and concern.

-- Stephen Daniels



Book Information
ISBN 9781473924994
Author Mike Hulme
Format Paperback
Page Count 200
Imprint Sage Publications Ltd
Publisher Sage Publications Ltd
Weight(grams) 350g