Download or read book A Cultural History of Climate written by Wolfgang Behringer and published by Polity. This book was released on 2010 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the latest historical research on the development of the earth's climate, showing how even minor changes in the climate could result in major social, political, and religious upheavals.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Climate Change written by Tom Bristow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charting innovative directions in the environmental humanities, this book examines the cultural history of climate change under three broad headings: history, writing and politics. Climate change compels us to rethink many of our traditional means of historical understanding, and demands new ways of relating human knowledge, action and representations to the dimensions of geological and evolutionary time. To address these challenges, this book positions our present moment of climatic knowledge within much longer histories of climatic experience. Only in light of these histories, it argues, can we properly understand what climate means today across an array of discursive domains, from politics, literature and law to neighbourly conversation. Its chapters identify turning-points and experiments in the construction of climates and of atmospheres of sensation. They examine how contemporary ecological thought has repoliticised the representation of nature and detail vital aspects of the history and prehistory of our climatic modernity. This ground-breaking text will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in environmental history, environmental governance, history of ideas and science, literature and eco-criticism, political theory, cultural theory, as well as all general readers interested in climate change.
Download or read book Cultural Histories Memories and Extreme Weather written by Georgina H. Endfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extreme weather events, such as droughts, strong winds and storms, flash floods and extreme heat and cold, are among the most destructive yet fascinating aspects of climate variability. Historical records and memories charting the impacts and responses to such events are a crucial component of any research that seeks to understand the nature of events that might take place in the future. Yet all such events need to be situated for their implications to be understood. This book is the first to explore the cultural contingency of extreme and unusual weather events and the ways in which they are recalled, recorded or forgotten. It illustrates how geographical context, particular physical conditions, an area’s social and economic activities and embedded cultural knowledges and infrastructures all affect community experiences of and responses to unusual weather. Contributions refer to varied methods of remembering and recording weather and how these act to curate, recycle and transmit extreme events across generations and into the future. With international case studies, from both land and sea, the book explores how and why particular weather events become inscribed into the fabric of communities and contribute to community change in different historical and cultural contexts. This is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in historical and cultural geography, environmental anthropology and environmental studies.
Download or read book Weather Matters written by Bernard Mergen and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A kaleidoscopic book that illuminates our obsession with weather--as both physical reality and evocative metaphor--focusing on the ways in which it is perceived, feared, embraced, managed, and even marketed.
Download or read book How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate written by Andrew J. Hoffman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-11 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This brief examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Synthesizing evidence from sociology, psychology, and political science, Andrew J. Hoffman lays bare the opposing cultural lenses through which science is interpreted. He then extracts lessons from major cultural shifts in the past to engender a better understanding of the problem and motivate the public to take action. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate makes a powerful case for a more scientifically literate public, a more socially engaged scientific community, and a more thoughtful mode of public discourse.
Download or read book Rain written by Cynthia Barnett and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.
Download or read book Climate and Culture written by Giuseppe Feola and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses how culture both facilitates and inhibits our ability to address, live with, and make sense of climate change.
Download or read book Weathered written by Mike Hulme and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Historical Perspectives on Climate Change written by James Rodger Fleming and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-14 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intriguing volume provides a thorough examination of the historical roots of global climate change as a field of inquiry, from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. Based on primary and archival sources, the book is filled with interesting perspectives on what people have understood, experienced, and feared about the climate and its changes in the past. Chapters explore climate and culture in Enlightenment thought; climate debates in early America; the development of international networks of observation; the scientific transformation of climate discourse; and early contributions to understanding terrestrial temperature changes, infrared radiation, and the carbon dioxide theory of climate. But perhaps most important, this book shows what a study of the past has to offer the interdisciplinary investigation of current environmental problems.
Download or read book Weather Climate and the Geographical Imagination written by Martin Mahony and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As global temperatures rise under the forcing hand of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, new questions are being asked of how societies make sense of their weather, of the cultural values, which are afforded to climate, and of how environmental futures are imagined, feared, predicted, and remade. Weather, Climate, and Geographical Imagination contributes to this conversation by bringing together a range of voices from history of science, historical geography, and environmental history, each speaking to a set of questions about the role of space and place in the production, circulation, reception, and application of knowledges about weather and climate. The volume develops the concept of “geographical imagination” to address the intersecting forces of scientific knowledge, cultural politics, bodily experience, and spatial imaginaries, which shape the history of knowledges about climate.
Download or read book Reading the Skies written by Vladimir Jankovic and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-04-19 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the time of Aristotle until the late eighteenth century, meteorology meant the study of "meteors"—spectacular objects in the skies beneath the moon, which included everything from shooting stars to hailstorms. In Reading the Skies, Vladimir Jankovic traces the history of this meteorological tradition in Enlightenment Britain, examining its scientific and cultural significance. Jankovic interweaves classical traditions, folk/popular beliefs and practices, and the increasingly quantitative approaches of urban university men to understanding the wonders of the skies. He places special emphasis on the role that detailed meteorological observations played in natural history and chorography, or local geography; in religious and political debates; and in agriculture. Drawing on a number of archival sources, including correspondence and weather diaries, as well as contemporary pamphlets, tracts, and other printed sources reporting prodigious phenomena in the skies, this book will interest historians of science, Britain, and the environment.
Download or read book Climate Affluence and Culture written by Evert Van de Vliert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-22 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone, everyday, everywhere has to cope with climatic cold or heat to satisfy survival needs, using money. This point of departure led to a decade of innovative research on the basis of the tenet that climate and affluence influence each other's impact on culture. Evert Van de Vliert discovered survival cultures in poor countries with demanding cold or hot climates, self-expression cultures in rich countries with demanding cold or hot climates, and easygoing cultures in poor and rich countries with temperate climates. These findings have implications for the cultural consequences of global warming and local poverty. Climate protection and poverty reduction are used in combination to sketch four scenarios for shaping cultures, from which the world community has to make a principal and principled choice soon.
Download or read book Climate Change and Cultural Transition in Europe written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-02-12 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate Change and Cultural Transition in Europe is an account of Europe’s share in the making of global warming, which considers the past and future of climate-society interactions. Contributors include: Clara Brandi, Rüdiger Glaser, Iso Himmelsbach, Claudia Kemfert, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Claus Leggewie, Franz Mauelshagen, Geoffrey Parker, Christian Pfister, Dirk Riemann, Lea Schmitt, Jörn Sieglerschmidt, Markus Vogt, and Steffen Vogt.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Climate Change written by Michael R. Dove and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-24 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely anthology brings together for the first time the most important ancient, medieval, Enlightenment, and modern scholarship for a complete anthropological evaluation of the relationship between culture and climate change. Brings together for the first time the most important classical works and contemporary scholarship for a complete historical anthropological evaluation of the relationship between culture and climate change Covers the historic and prehistoric records of human impact from and response to prior periods of climate change, including the impact and response to climate change at the local level Discusses the impact on global debates about climate change from North-South post-colonial histories and the social dimensions of the science of climate change. Includes coverage of topics such as environmental determinism, climatic events as social catalysts, climatic disasters and societal collapse, and ethno-meteorology An ideal text for courses in climate change, human/cultural ecology, environmental anthropology and archaeology, disaster studies, environmental sciences, science and technology studies, history of science, and conservation and development studies
Download or read book The Little Ice Age written by Brian Fagan and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only in the last decade have climatologists developed an accurate picture of yearly climate conditions in historical times. This development confirmed a long-standing suspicion: that the world endured a 500-year cold snap -- The Little Ice Age -- that lasted roughly from A.D. 1300 until 1850. The Little Ice Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable and often very cold years of modern European history, how climate altered historical events, and what they mean in the context of today's global warming. With its basis in cutting-edge science, The Little Ice Age offers a new perspective on familiar events. Renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan shows how the increasing cold affected Norse exploration; how changing sea temperatures caused English and Basque fishermen to follow vast shoals of cod all the way to the New World; how a generations-long subsistence crisis in France contributed to social disintegration and ultimately revolution; and how English efforts to improve farm productivity in the face of a deteriorating climate helped pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and hence for global warming. This is a fascinating, original book for anyone interested in history, climate, or the new subject of how they interact.
Download or read book Snowshoe Country written by Thomas M. Wickman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An environmental and cultural history of winter in the colonial Northeast, examining indigenous and settler knowledge of life in the cold.
Download or read book Climate and Culture Change in North America AD 900 1600 written by William C. Foster and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Additional keywords : Aboriginal or Native peoples, Indians, First Nations.
