This book is about the idea of climate, an enduring idea of the human mind and also a powerful one. Today, the idea of climate is most commonly associated with the phenomenon and discourse of climate-change1 and its scientific, economic, religious, ethical, social and political dimensions. I have written about these axes of public argumentation in an earlier book− Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Hulme, 2009)− but before the cultural politics of climate-change can truly be understood, I believe a richer understanding of the idea of climate itself is needed. Because climate-change is such a pervasive phenomenon and discourse which is re-making the contemporary world, it is important to take a step back and undertake historical, geographical and cultural investigations of the idea of climate itself. Like any interesting word,‘climate’defies easy definition for reasons explained in Chapter 1. My argument in Weathered is that climate− as it is imagined, studied and acted upon− needs to be understood, first and foremost, culturally. Since climate is a complex and abstract idea, it cannot be understood independently of the cultures within which the idea takes shape. This argument challenges the primacy of natural science definitions of climate and, hence, questions the predominantly scientific understanding of (humancaused) climate-change. For example, the successive assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) promote the view that climate should be understood as a planetary system of physically interconnecting processes, a system which can adequately be represented and hence predicted using mathematical models. This framing of climate is dominant in much academic scholarship, in politics and in public debates. It assumes that changes in climate, and in its human and non-human drivers, are to be studied, explained and predicted through scientific theory and observation. As a consequence, forensic detection and attribution studies using ensembles of complex climate models and arcane statistics have become central to the scientific and public status of the reality of climate-change. But there is another story to be told about climate-change, one which starts with the cultural origins of the idea of climate. Rather than framing climate solely as an interconnected global physical system or as a statistical artefact of

1 Throughout this book I use the construction ‘climate-change’to refer to the contemporary idea of human-caused global climatic change. In this way I differentiate the physical and discursive realities of anthropogenic changes in global climate from other expressions of change, for example,‘climate change’(un-hyphenated),‘changes in climate’or ‘climatic change’.