A History of Storms: New Approaches to Climate Fiction and Climate Literacy

在过去的30年里，科学家和作家对我们不断变化的气候提出了更详细、更准确、更有影响力的叙述。这项工作有助于确保气候变化的原因和影响现在得到广泛宣传，并在很大程度上得到世界各地政府、组织和个人的理解。然而，最近几次缔约方会议气候峰会的谈判已经证明，仅仅理解（甚至深切感受到）气候变化的原因和影响并不足以确保迫切需要的国际协议和变革性社会行动。这是一个叙事问题，正如蒂莫西·克拉克（Timothy Clark）等哲学家所讨论的那样，这是一个规模问题（2016）。我们需要的是新的叙事形式，这种形式可以在气候变化和人类经历的巨大不同的时空尺度上发挥作用。正如Dipesh Chakrabarty所说：“我们需要将深刻和记录的历史联系起来”，并将气候科学的“行星”时间尺度与人类历史和经验的时间尺度“对话”。该项目将通过与英国气象局合作开发的一种新形式的“历史气候小说”来引发这样的对话。这种伙伴关系将允许创造性地参与尖端的气候科学和英国气象局档案馆鲜为人知的文件，这些文件描绘了这门科学的历史和发展。气象学和气候学的历史就是基础设施、技术、资本主义、冲突和帝国的历史。这也是一部人的历史。英国气象局的档案讲述了传教士一丝不苟地记录降雨量的故事，电报员传达了第一次风暴预报，商人水手通过在世界各地的贸易路线上存放“瓶纸”来绘制洋流。迄今为止，这些来源主要用作气候模型的数据集。该项目旨在恢复这些来源的本地化人类历史，并将其与现代气候科学的行星观点进行创造性对话，为一种虚构的方法提供基础，该方法将在截然不同的空间和时间尺度上运作。这一历史性对话早就应该进行了。正如气候正义活动家和来自全球南方的作者所断言的那样，单方面行动的一个主要障碍是IPCC报告中提出的科学叙述几乎没有提到历史。或者更确切地说，它提供的历史视角是“人类”被描绘为一个统一的整体，而不是用唐娜·哈拉维的话来说，“处于复杂历史中的人类”（2016）。这个项目将以从英国气象局档案中出现的“定位”和“复杂”的人类历史为起点。它会问这些历史可以告诉我们什么话语，结构和基础叙事，支撑现代科学，以及它们必须如何适应我们不断变化的世界。中央这个奖学金将是跨学科合作的持续过程，通过创造性的工作坊在英国气象局的计划。这些研讨会将使科学家参与该奖学金正在进行的研究和实践，并将用于开发和测试将为创造性成果和气象局新的“气候扫盲”战略提供信息的想法。通过这种方式，奖学金不仅将产生新的虚构叙事，以吸引更广泛的公众，它还将显示创造性的实践作为研究的潜力，以帮助在一个主要的科学机构塑造政策和实践，为未来的跨学科工作提供一个令人兴奋的和创新的模式，将艺术和人文科学研究置于应对气候变化战略的中心。

Over the past thirty years scientists and writers have presented ever more detailed, accurate and impactful narratives of our changing climate. This work has helped to ensure that causes and effects of climate change are now widely communicated and are largely understood by governments, organizations and individuals around the world. However, as the stalled negotiations of recent COP climate summits have proven, simply understanding (even deeply feeling) the causes and effects of climate change is not enough to ensure the international agreements and transformative social action that is desperately needed. This is a problem of narrative and, as philosophers such as Timothy Clark have discussed, a problem of scale (2016). What is needed are new narrative forms that can work across the vastly different spatial and temporal scales of climate change and human experience. As Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it: 'We need to connect deep and recorded histories' and put the 'planetary' timescales of climate science 'in conversation' with the timescales of human history and experience (2021). This project will instigate just such a conversation through a new form of 'historical climate fiction' developed in partnership with the Met Office. This partnership will allow for a creative engagement with both cutting-edge climate science and little-known documents from the Met Office archives that chart the history and development of this science. The history of meteorology and climatology is the history of infrastructure, technology, capitalism, conflict and empire. It is also a history of people. The Met Office archives tell the stories of missionaries meticulously recording rainfall, of telegraph operators conveying the first storm forecasts and of merchant sailors mapping ocean currents by depositing 'Bottle Papers' along trade routes around the world. To date, such sources have been used primarily as data sets for climate models. This project seeks to recover the localised human histories of these sources and bring them into creative dialogue with the planetary perspectives of modern climate science, providing the foundation for a fictional method that will operate across vastly different spatial and temporal scales. This historical dialogue is long overdue. As climate justice campaigners and authors from the global south have asserted, a major barrier to unilateral action is the fact that the scientific narrative presented in the IPCC Report makes almost no mention of history (Ghosh, 2021). Or rather, the historical perspective it offers is one in which 'humanity' is figured as a uniform totality rather than, in Donna Haraway's words, 'situated human beings in complicated histories' (2016). This project will take as its starting point the 'situated' and 'complicated' human histories that emerge from the Met Office archives. It will ask what these histories can tell us about the discourses, structures and foundational narratives that underpin modern science, and how they must be adapted to engage with our changing world.Central to this fellowship will be a sustained process of interdisciplinary collaboration, through a programme of creative workshops at the Met Office. These workshops will engage scientists with the ongoing research and practice of this fellowship and will be used to develop and test ideas which will inform both the creative outputs and the Met Office's new 'climate literacy' strategy. In this way, the fellowship will not only generate new fictional narratives to engage the wider public, it will also show the potential for creative practice-as-research to help shape policy and practice at a major scientific institution, providing an exciting and innovative model for future interdisciplinary work that puts Arts and Humanities research at the centre of the strategic response to climate change.