Climate (F)Acts. Climate and/As the Social

This paper investigates the ways in which ‘climate’ can be considered as social assemblage. It does so by showing how climate facts and factors have often been construed as climate acts and actors. This is illustrated by considering three ways in which climate has historically been construed in relation to the social.

The first is to consider climate as a causal (f)actor. This has been prevalent from classical authors such as Hippocrates and Ovid to modern authors such as Montesquieu, and has persisted up until the origins of modern climate science. This is illustrated with historical examples.

The second construes climate as an enrolment assemblage. Here, climate becomes an assemblage of various heterogeneous (f)actors working together with human actors to produce what we now call climate. This is illustrated in this paper using data from an ethnographic field study among paleoclimatologists.

The third way to consider climate as a social assemblage is to construe climate as medium of relationality. In this view, inspired by authors ranging from Watsuji Tetsuro to Tim Ingold, climate is a relational web that is the space in which life unfolds. The paper concludes by illustrating climate as medium in a speculative way, arguing that this conception implies a significantly different social ontology from that which has characterized modernity.