Revisiting Klima
Revisiting Klima
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重温克利马
作者：
James Rodger Fleming;V. Jankovic
我们将这本书命名为Klima。(“κλίμα时期”)。这个简洁但充满活力的绰号诠释了这些贡献的基调，恢复了对一个古老但难以捉摸的术语的多语种和包容性的理解。我们试图将Klima从目前与大气科学的独家联系中解脱出来，并重新审视一个古老的词汇对医学、地理、农业、经济、种族和其他“地方性”问题的影响。如果气候不仅仅与天气有关，那它是什么呢？它试图解释什么？气候是什么时候被援引的？谁干的？为了什么目的？文化、社会、文明、时间、变化等其他“关键词”又是如何联系起来的呢？气候在哪些方面代表了监管、行业和身份认同等其他问题？什么时候这根本不是一种解释？气候在哪里化身？这又有什么关系呢？现代科学气候学无法回答这些问题。然而，它背负着描绘气候如何与社会和经济生活相关的巨大挑战。这也许是不可避免的，因为气候的定义将它从“生活的”体验中抽象出来，并将其构建为一个派生实体，一个跨空间和时间的平均参数的统计指数。1897年，杰出的奥地利气象学家朱利叶斯·汉恩写道：“我们所说的气候是指表征地球表面任何一个地方大气平均状况的气象现象的总和。”1根据开创性的气象飞行员和气象学家卡尔·施奈德·卡里乌斯的说法，“气候学研究的是天气的平均状态，以及不同类型天气在其地理分布中的频率。”2最近，世界气象组织将气候定义为‘平均天气’，或者更严格地说，在从几个月到几千年或几百万年的一段时间内，相关数量的平均值和变异性的统计描述。
We have named this volume Klima. (“κλίμα period”). This terse but dynamic moniker fi ts the tone of the contributions, which revive a multivocal and inclusive understanding of a venerable but elusive term. We seek to decouple Klima from its current exclusive association with atmospheric sciences and revisit the implications of an ancient vocabulary for medical, geographical, agricultural, economic, racial, and other “endemic” concerns. If climate is not just about the weather, what is it? What does it seek to explain? When is climate invoked? By whom? For what purposes? How are other “key words” linked with it, such as culture, society, civilization, time, and change? In what ways is climate a proxy for other concerns such as regulation, industry, and identity? When is it not an explanation at all? Where is climate incarnated? And how does it matter? Modern scientifi c climatology cannot answer these questions. Yet it is burdened with the enormous challenge of delineating how climate relates to social and economic life. This is perhaps inevitable, given that the defi nition of climate abstracts it from the “lived” experience and constructs it as a derived entity, a statistical index of averaged parameters across space and time. In 1897, the preeminent Austrian meteorologist Julius Hann wrote that “by climate we mean the sum total of the meteorological phenomena that characterize the average condition of the atmosphere at any one place on the earth’s surface.”1 According to Karl SchneiderCarius, the pioneering weather pilot and meteorologist, “Climatology is concerned with the average states of weather, and the frequency of the different individual types of weather in their geographical distribution.”2 More recently, the World Meteorological Organization defi ned climate “as the ‘average weather,’ or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years.”3 In a broader, scientifi c