Weather walks, weather talks: exploring popular climate histories and futures

政治和媒体对气候变化可能产生的影响的关注，以科学为主导的表述，以及日益全球化的气候思维，掩盖了气候在文化上的特殊性，以及在空间和时间上的独特性。因此，有必要将文化价值与气候变化的辩论重新联系起来。人们回忆和记忆特定类型天气的方式，以及他们对过去气候和天气事件的怀旧之情，还有待进一步研究。关注这些过程可以帮助我们更清楚地了解大众对气候和气候变化的理解是如何形成的，并将其作为生活经验的一部分。近年来，越来越多的人使用声音和声音来解释和探索公众如何理解历史、文化和自然景观。然而，说话、走路和倾听在帮助提高公众对过去气候和天气的理解和欣赏方面的作用，更不用说可能的气候未来，仍有待探索。为了应对这一挑战，该项目侧重于两种实验策略，这两种策略都旨在让公众参与到气候和天气的历史地理中来。它涉及皇家地理学会、英国地理学家研究所（RGS-IBG）和皇家气象学会（RMetS）的项目合作伙伴。我们将通过一系列计划在2012年6月WAMFest上进行的音频和视频记录，通过个人的、受欢迎的回忆来调查人们对天气和气候变化的普遍记忆。目的是透过视听媒体，让公众记录个人对天气的记忆、特别的天气事件，以及他们一生中对气候变化的看法。由此，我们将能够确定人们如何记住天气，以及对天气事件的记忆和经验以及对气候变化的看法如何影响个人态度、行为和对气候变化辩论的理解。这些材料将被编辑并出版成册，并通过RMetS网站提供给广大公众，学童，学生，教师，研究人员和对气象学感兴趣的专业人士。我们还寻求开发一个集成的音频/混合媒体天气行走。这次步行活动的重点是英国气候学家和文化气候学的先驱戈登·曼利教授的工作，他为英国收集和分析长期的业余仪器天气记录，以及他对人们对天气的理解，以及他们对天气的个人欣赏和社会记忆的兴趣。当气候的“关系背景”被认为是理解不同地方的不同群体如何理解气候变化的关键时，他的工作特别流行。这次天气漫步将集中在奔宁山脉的敦菲尔，曼利在那里经营着一个气象站，将包括他关于这些主题的文章摘录，并有机会下载他在20世纪50年代至1980年去世期间出版的各种流行气候出版物中的文本和图像。预计天气漫步将成为RGS-IBG倡议“发现英国”的一部分，该倡议代表了整个英国一系列权威的高质量故事音频漫步的中心，专门面向广大公众。利用诺丁汉大学的技术专长，我们还试图探索一种定位媒体原型的开发，该原型将被设计用于基于android的智能手机。我们打算测试如何通过移动技术，让参与者在步行过程中做出不同的贡献，从而丰富个人用户在行走过程中的空间感。

Political and media focus on the possible implications of climate change, the predominantly scientific discourse in which this is couched, and the increasingly global scale of climate thinking, have obscured the culturally specific and spatially and temporally distinctive meanings of climate. There is thus a need to reconnect cultural values to debates about climate change. The way in which people recall and remember particular types of weather, and their nostalgia about past climate and weather events, remain to be explored in any detail. A focus on these processes could help us gain a clearer insight into the fashioning of popular understanding about climate and climate change as part of lived experience. In recent years, there has been an increase in the use of sound and voice to interpret and explore how the public makes sense of the historical, cultural and physical landscape. Yet the role of talking, walking and listening in helping to improve public understanding and appreciation of past climate and weather, not to mention possible climate futures, remains to be explored. In responding to this challenge, this project focuses on two experimental strategies, both geared towards public engagement with historical geographies of climate and the weather. It involves project partners the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) and the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS).We will investigate popular memories of weather and climate change over time through personal, popular recollections, via a series of audio and video recordings planned to take place at WAMFest in June 2012. The purpose will be to offer provision for the public, through audio and visual media, to record personal memories about the weather, particular weather events and their own perspectives on climate change experienced during their lifetimes. From this we will be able to identify how people remember the weather and how memory and experience of weather events and perceptions of climate change influence personal attitudes, behaviours and understanding of climate change debates. These materials will be edited and presented in a published volume and via the RMetS website and so made available to a very wide range of publics, school children, students, teachers, researchers and professionals with an interest in meteorology.We also seek to develop an integrated audio/ mixed media weather walk. The proposed walk focuses on the work of British climatologist and pioneer of cultural climatology, Professor Gordon Manley who is associated with the collection and analysis of long-term, amateur, instrumental weather records for the UK, and his interest in people’s understandings of the weather, and their personal appreciation and social memory of the weather. His work has particular currency at a time when the ‘relational context’ of climate is being identified as critical for understanding how different groups of people in different places comprehend climate change. The weather walk, which will be focused on Dun Fell in the Pennines where Manley ran a weather station, will include excerpts from his writings on these themes and opportunities to download texts and images taken from his various popular publications on climate published between the 1950s and his death in 1980. It is anticipated that the weather walk will feature as part of the RGS-IBG initiative, Discovering Britain, which represents a hub for a range of authoritative high quality story-led audio walks across the whole of Britain, specifically geared to engage a cross section of the general public. Drawing upon technical expertise at Nottingham, we also seek to explore the development of a locative media prototype, which will be designed to run on android-based 'smart phones. We propose to test how, through mobile technologies, the diverse contributions of participants on the walk might enrich an individual user's sense of place as he or she moves through it.