Robert L Naylor
How did you learn about climate change? Did you delve into the scientific literature and come up with a detached conclusion? No-one does this.
Concern over climate change lives within our society. My parents told me about how humans were destroying the planet. My teachers told me about the greenhouse effect at school. The TV told me. The internet told me. Greta Thunburg, Al Gore, and even Boris Johnson told me. Climate change is a societal force as well as a physical phenomenon.
I see it as my job to investigate climate change as a societal force.
This is not as simple as it sounds. This isn’t a linear story of climate scientists coming up with startling conclusions that are then transmitted into the political sphere – if this was the case, climate activism would have started in the 1938, when the basic scientific tenets of climate change narratives were laid out by Guy Stewart Callendar, or in 1960, when these tenets were confirmed by the measurements of Charles Keeling.
Rather, the rise of climate change discourse is a complex story regarding the utilisation and receptibility of climate-based narratives, a story that is very much still developing today.
My work can be split into two main strands.
I look at how climate discourse has emerged as an important societal phenomenon through resonances with wider events. Most notably, I have uncovered the co-option of several high-profile climate events by policy entrepreneurs during a period of financial crisis in the early 1970s, with charismatic orators drawing a causal link between long-term climatic change and rising domestic food prices in the United States.
I also investigate how the atmosphere has come to materially affect everyday lives through the use of climate and weather information by utilities administrators. For example, I investigate how integrated atmosphere-energy systems exhibit emergent vulnerabilities under the pressures of consumer demand.
Concern over climate change lives within our society. My parents told me about how humans were destroying the planet. My teachers told me about the greenhouse effect at school. The TV told me. The internet told me. Greta Thunburg, Al Gore, and even Boris Johnson told me. Climate change is a societal force as well as a physical phenomenon.
I see it as my job to investigate climate change as a societal force.
This is not as simple as it sounds. This isn’t a linear story of climate scientists coming up with startling conclusions that are then transmitted into the political sphere – if this was the case, climate activism would have started in the 1938, when the basic scientific tenets of climate change narratives were laid out by Guy Stewart Callendar, or in 1960, when these tenets were confirmed by the measurements of Charles Keeling.
Rather, the rise of climate change discourse is a complex story regarding the utilisation and receptibility of climate-based narratives, a story that is very much still developing today.
My work can be split into two main strands.
I look at how climate discourse has emerged as an important societal phenomenon through resonances with wider events. Most notably, I have uncovered the co-option of several high-profile climate events by policy entrepreneurs during a period of financial crisis in the early 1970s, with charismatic orators drawing a causal link between long-term climatic change and rising domestic food prices in the United States.
I also investigate how the atmosphere has come to materially affect everyday lives through the use of climate and weather information by utilities administrators. For example, I investigate how integrated atmosphere-energy systems exhibit emergent vulnerabilities under the pressures of consumer demand.
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However, despite this important work, many climate histories overlook the 1970s and diminish its importance, instead choosing to focus on the foundation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 and discounting events that could not be construed as a direct precedent to this process. This workshop aims to help rectify this by highlighting climate change ideas when they were at an amorphous, protean stage, when the issue was made to resonate with diverse economic and political interests before it became one of the defining features of turn-of-century discourse. By doing this, we hope to better understand the diverse ways in which we have come to know, perceive, and politicise the climate and its changes in order to better navigate the present.
However, despite this important work, many climate histories overlook the 1970s and diminish its importance, instead choosing to focus on the foundation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 and discounting events that could not be construed as a direct precedent to this process. This workshop aims to help rectify this by highlighting climate change ideas when they were at an amorphous, protean stage, when the issue was made to resonate with diverse economic and political interests before it became one of the defining features of turn-of-century discourse. By doing this, we hope to better understand the diverse ways in which we have come to know, perceive, and politicise the climate and its changes in order to better navigate the present.
Relevant work includes Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, which argues, for example, that research into hypothetical sunspot-driven climatic changes was utilised to help excuse British authorities who oversaw the Great Famine in India. Philip Slavin (2019) has presented a complex picture of the British famine of 1314-17, where agriculturalists had to face unrelenting taxes and forced food sales alongside an inclement climate. Critiques of climate attribution theses have a long history, with meteorologist Rolando Garcia’s 1981 work Nature Pleads Not Guilty disputing the climate attribution thesis of food insecurity in the 1970s. More recent work by Jan Selby, Omar Dahi, Christiane Fröhlich, and Mike Hulme has interrogated the climate attribution thesis of the Syrian conflict, arguing that policymakers should exercise greater caution when drawing such links. Even more recently, Myanna Lahsen and Jesse Ribot (2022) argued that ‘climate-centric disaster framing can erase from view—and, thus, from policy agendas—the very socio-economic and political factors that most centrally cause vulnerability and suffering in weather extremes and disasters.’
Such discussions are rich, but often suffer from being siloed in isolated academic subjects and institutions. This workshop aims to bring together scholars across disciplines to critically examine powerful and controversial climate-based narratives around food insecurity that have long permeated public discourse.