Knowing climate as a social-ecological-atmospheric construct

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2017.12.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Climate attitude and literacy approaches neglect much of local climate knowledge.

  • Rural communities in particular develop deep understandings of weather and climate.

  • Experienced climate knowledge is relational and built on proxies.

  • People expressed climate knowledge through decision rubrics.

  • For local communities, climate is a social-ecological-atmospheric construct.

Abstract

Climate perception, broadly construed, can include interpretations of experienced climate, beliefs about how climate works or changes, attitudes about climate issues such as the human role in climate change, and even climate preferences. The recent literature has stressed three main themes: attitudes and beliefs about anthropogenic climate change, climate literacy, and experienced knowledge of climate change. This study focuses on how people come to “know” climate, not just climate change, in a more fundamental way. To discern the structure of these knowledges we conducted semi-structured interviews of residents of a basin in the U.S. Rocky Mountains whose livelihoods and avocations bring them in routine contact with weather, climate, and landscape. Analysis of their climate knowledge in three categories, features, processes, and benchmarks, and placed in perspective of previous research on climate knowledges, yielded three findings. 1) People often focus on climate-related proxies that might be disregarded as tangential within narrow definitions of climate. 2) People use rubrics to structure climate knowledge, they understand climate as relational and connected. 3) Climate knowledge does not isolate individual climate elements, but accentuates the complex way that many processes together constitute climate. These findings reveal that, for our interviewees, climate is a social-ecological-atmospheric construct. This has both theoretical and methodological implications for future research on climate perception and illuminates the challenge of linking perception to effective mitigation and adaptation.

Introduction

The Pew Research Center reported that in 2016 only 48% of Americans believed that global warming was occurring due to human activity (Funk and Kennedy, 2016). This was only one example of a number of surveys meant to assess Americans’ perceptions of climate change (Borick et al., 2010; Pugliese and Ray, 2011; Kohut et al., 2011; Leiserowitz et al., 2017). The notion that roughly half of Americans do not accept the scientific consensus on global warming circulates through communities of scholars, activists, and practitioners and is discussed in research, policy, and the media (Leiserowitz, 2006; Harris, 2011; Kahan et al., 2012).

The reported disparity between scientists and the public has motivated a range of studies. Several large-scale surveys have probed variables that might influence public perception, and specifically climate change skepticism, and have found a number of different correlations ranging from livelihood (Arbuckle et al., 2013), to political affiliation (Dunlap and McCright, 2008), to gender (Sundblad et al., 2007; Israel and Sachs, 2013), to political attitudes about solutions (Leiserowitz, 2006), to distrust of science (Kahan et al., 2012). Others scholars have interpreted global warming skepticism as a lack of knowledge about climate processes and climate change. However, the inference from beliefs about climate change to climate illiteracy over-simplifies the idea of climate knowledges, and may distort our understanding of how people perceive climate differently and why.

Less attention is given to questions that push beyond beliefs about climate change or scientifically-accurate knowledge of climate processes to focus on how people understand their climate in its multifarious nature. Yet, climate knowledge is at the foundation of social dimensions of climate and permeates other studies of attitudes and actions. A person’s understanding of climate—how it works, what elements are important, what counts as climate—will undoubtedly shape how they understand and respond to climate change (Hulme, 2009, Hulme, 2017). Understanding climate knowledge is important for understanding climate change knowledge and may not be captured in climate change belief or literacy surveys, that can fail to capture how climate and climate change are known.

The purpose of this study is to examine climate knowledges in depth to understand their content and structure. People interact with weather and climate on a daily basis (Hulme, 2017), and researchers using qualitative methods and critical theories can ask how individuals understand and know climate change as a product of their experiences with place (Brace and Geoghegan, 2011; Rice et al., 2015). Inasmuch as our inquiry is concerned with climate change, it is about how people understand climate change rather than if they believe in it. We approach this by interviewing people with climate knowledge produced through rich experiences with local weather, climate, and their manifestations through the behavior and quality of natural resources to which their livelihoods and avocations connect.

This research can help expand the way we understand local knowledge and perceptions of climate and may challenge, or at least problematize, previous claims about climate skepticism. Better understanding the character of climate knowledge can improve conclusions about why people hold particular beliefs about climate. This analysis may provide further insight into previous interpretations of public perceptions of climate and highlight how local climate knowledge may fail to meet climate literacy tests, but still reflect a robust and intricate understanding of local climate. In this paper, we first describe the scholarship of different approaches to climate perception. Then we highlight three key findings from our fieldwork in Colorado’s Gunnison Basin on how people know climate through everyday experience. Lastly, we explore how these findings provide alternative interpretations of the claims produced through literacy and belief surveys.

Section snippets

Climate perceptions: attitudes, literacy and knowledges

Climate perception, broadly construed, can include interpretations of experienced weather and climate (and, indeed, the distinction between weather and climate), beliefs about how climate works or changes, attitudes about climate issues such as the human role in climate change, and even climate preferences. We divide the study of climate perception is broadly into three approaches. First, large, regional or national-scale surveys provide longitudinal data on changing beliefs and attitudes about

Seeking climate knowledge

Like Geoghegan and Leyson (2012) we seek to contribute to climate perception scholarship by focusing on experienced climate knowledge developed by individuals with expertise of climate, rather than a sample of the general public that might be less attuned to climate. Unlike Rice et al. (2015), we study the knowledge built by local people with a long, intimate relationship with their environment (Solli and Ryghaug, 2014), rather than a sample with different residence times. We examine this

Finding 1: climate is known and discussed through climate-related proxies rather than climate itself

In discussing climate, participants often described climate-related proxies rather than climate as it would be defined by climate science (e.g., via station data, climate summaries, or model output). When asked a range of questions about climate, many of the interviewees made reference to atmospheric states and processes, but simultaneously entrained ecological and social elements. Interviewees integrated the impacts of climate with land and resource management decisions, rather than sorting

Finding 2: climate knowledge is shaped by rubrics

People use climate rubrics, based on their own, or others’, experienced climate knowledge, to make sense of complex patterns. We define climate rubrics as stable evaluative linkages that people apply to determine how one feature will affect another feature, or refract through a benchmark; these linkages coevolved over time and allow people to use climate information about one feature to inform decisions about another feature or benchmark. Rubrics that people expressed took several forms, with

Finding 3: people did not discuss different elements of climate discretely, but instead in an integrated way

Interviewees did not always isolate specific climate variables nor discuss them discretely, but instead refused to disentangle elements from their complex relationships and contexts. People rarely talked about one climate element (e.g. temperature) removed from its connection to others, and instead explained to us how elements interacted with related processes. This highlights how experienced climate knowledge reflects an integrated system, allowing residents to understand how impacts of

A social-ecological-atmospheric construct

Our aim was to better understand the content and structure of climate knowledge, to focus on what was present rather than absent in that knowledge, and to evaluate whether people were as naïve about their climate as many previous studies claimed. By taking an approach that engaged climate broadly, we were able to identify three findings about the character of this knowledge help us better conceptualize how, not if, people understand climate. Our first finding showed that people often keyed on

Conclusion: a more inclusive climate

Our research can provide new interpretations of results from previous research on attitudes about climate change, especially skepticism. Surveys of attitudes toward climate change fail to address the underlying question of how people understand climate, much less why and how it changes. A focus on climate skepticism assumes that climate change beliefs are based on ignorance, politics and socio-economic motivations, when differences in climate experiences, and climate knowledges, could lead to

Authors’ contributions

KC and WT conceived of the study. KC conducted the fieldwork, interviews and initial analysis. KC and WT drew conclusions and co-wrote the paper.

Declaration

The authors declare no financial/personal interest or belief that could affect their objectivity in this research. The funding agency did not participate in the design or carrying out of the work.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the many residents of Gunnison, Colorado who participated in interviews. We are grateful to Sara Fall and three anonymous reviewers whose comments and feedback improved this paper. Ami Nacu-Schmidt produced the map. Research was supported by the Western Water Assessment, a project of the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences, funded by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Climate Program Office

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