Cultural Spaces of Climate Network

当代关于未来气候变化威胁的辩论，加上对人为全球变暖明显加速的关注，以及气候模型在气候变化研究中的普遍主导地位，掩盖了气候对不同地方的不同人所具有的独特意义，以及过去所具有的独特意义。虽然人们的共识是，全球气候正在变化，人类活动正在加剧自然气候的多变性，气候变化将对整个全球社会构成新的重大挑战，但对不同社会、经济和生态系统的确切影响却不太清楚。必须努力更好地了解不同背景环境中的不同人群在不同时间点如何对气候进行概念化并对其波动作出反应。因此，有人呼吁重新审查气候变化，即：）挑战日益全球化和科学化的气候观点; ii.）涉及气候及其文化和空间可变维度的概念。例如，最近的气候奖学金强调了理解不同时空背景下的不同人群如何将气候概念化的必要性。因此，目前正在努力探索“普通人”如何理解、谈论或书写气候并理解它，并将气候作为个人记忆、经验和“气候知识”代际转移的一个功能进行调查，所有这些都需要比全球视角更密切的空间分辨率。拟议的网络的目的是吸引来自艺术和人文学科内外的学术研究人员，专业和学术团体的代表，包括皇家地理学会与英国地理学家研究所（RGS-IBG）和皇家气象学会（RMetS）以及各种流行的气候和天气相关利益集团，包括气候观测员链接（COL），龙卷风和风暴研究组织（TORRO）和云鉴赏学会（CAS），从历史和当代的角度研究可能的方法，鼓励更多的文化驱动和地方规模的气候考虑。建议举办三次讲习班，让所有这些利益攸关方群体参加。这些将涉及一系列独特的主题：i.）艺术和人文方法对当代气候和气候变化论述的潜在贡献; ii.）在调查人、地点和气候之间的相互关系时采用历史观点的价值，以及将历史资料带入更广泛的公众和专业流通中以说明它们在发展过去和现在的气候叙述中的用途的价值; iii.）普通公民，特别是业余团体过去和将来如何对气候知识的产生和传播作出有益贡献，并确定他们如何作为公共、学术和专业领域之间的中介更多地参与。

Contemporary debates over the threat of future climate change, coupled with the fixation on the apparent acceleration in anthropogenic global warming, and the general dominance of climatic modelling in climate change studies, have obscured the distinctive meaning that climate holds, and has held in the past, for different people in different places. Although there is a consensus that the global climate is changing, that human activities are exacerbating natural climatic variability, and that climate change will pose new and significant challenges for global society at large, the precise impacts for different social, economic and ecological systems are less clearly understood. It is essential to try to obtain a better understanding of how different groups of people in different contextual settings and at different points in time have conceptualised climate and have responded to its fluctuations. There have, therefore, been calls for a re-examination of climate change that i.) challenges the increasingly global and scientific perspective on climate and ii.) addresses the idea of climate and its culturally and spatially variable dimensions. Recent climate scholarship has, for example, highlighted a need to understand how different groups of people in different spatial and temporal contexts conceptualise climate as an idea. Efforts are thus now being made to explore how 'ordinary people' understand, talk or write about climate and make sense of it and to investigate climate as a function of personal memory, experience and intergenerational transfer of 'climate knowledge', all of which demands a more intimate spatial resolution than global perspectives afford. The purpose of the proposed network is to draw together academic researchers from within and beyond the arts and humanities, representatives from professional and learned societies including the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) and the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) and various popular climate and weather related interest groups, including the Climatological Observers Link (COL), The Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO) and the Cloud Appreciation Society (CAS), to investigate possible approaches to encourage a more culturally driven and local-scale consideration of climate as an idea from both an historical and contemporary perspective. Three workshops are proposed involving all these stakeholder groups. These will address a series of distinctive themes: i.) the potential contribution that arts and humanities approaches can make to contemporary climate and climate change discourses; ii.) the value of adopting an historical perspective in the investigation of the interrelationships between people, place and climate and of bringing historical materials into wider public and professional circulation to illustrate their use in developing narratives of climates past and present and iii.) the way in which the ordinary citizen, and amateur groups in particular, have in the past and could in the future usefully contribute to the production and circulation of climate knowledge, and to establish how they might become more involved as intermediaries between the public, academic and professional domains.