Weathering climate: Telescoping change

Weathering climate: telescoping change Cristi án Simonetti Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile As the scientific distinction between climate and weather suggests, knowledge about climate is supposed to be beyond indigenous peoples’ everyday experience of the environment in that it requires a long-term record. On the basis of ethnographic work among geoscientists in Scotland and West Greenland, I show that practitioners of this discipline have mastered the craft of turning ‘visible’ what is ‘invisible’ to the senses by playing with shorter time-scales. In thinking and communicating about the past, geoscientists would compress and accelerate long-term environmental processes, often at the cost of dissociating them from processes occurring at shorter time-scales, particularly the adaptation of living organisms. Attending to the historical circumstances around the development of this skill, I argue that it relates to an ideal of objectivity in science that corresponds to an optical understanding of time, inspired by the image of the telescope. Challenging the distinction between climate and weather, and the epistemic distance on which it rests, I discuss recent approaches in environmental anthropology that have uncritically adopted this distinction to distinguish indigenous knowledge of the environment from climate science. In conclusion, informed by research with indigenous peoples of the Arctic, I speculate on alternative ways of understanding climate knowledge, beyond the climate-weather distinction. Knowledge about climate in science has been understood as beyond the memories and expectations that people encounter in the present. This is reflected in the fundamental distinction that scientists make between climate and weather. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an institution that collaborates closely with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has an important role in the scientific definition of climate, the term ‘climate’ constitutes a thirty-year average of the variations in weather conditions that are experienced daily in the atmosphere.1 To use an expression normally attributed to Mark Twain but often adopted by contemporary climate researchers, ‘the climate is what we expect, the weather is what we get’.2 Climate researchers see this distinction as a constant source of discord between scientific and public views on climate change. This tension resurfaced in a press release from the First Working Group (WG1) of the IPCC announcing the results of the Fifth Assessment Report, delivered in September 2013, only a few months after I had started my research with climate scientists. In the release, Michel Jarraud, Secretary General Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C 2 Cristi án Simonetti of the WMO, criticized climate change deniers by noting the short time-span of the so-called ‘global warming’ hiatus of the last decade, which many sceptics have used to support their views. Shorter than thirty years, the hiatus did not constitute a valid challenge to the claims outlined in the report, according to Jarraud.3 The basic assumption underlying this distinction is that climate depends on establishing a record, which allows science to engage with all that is beyond the reach of our senses and memories. This capacity to step outside everyday present experience is common in many sciences, including astronomy, particle physics, and microbiology, all of which access the invisible in time and space via instruments, methods, and technology. Climate sciences in particular provide access to processes in earth’s history that occur over long periods and across vast geographical expanses. In this exercise a contradiction emerges, related to the ontological status of scientific knowledge on climate, which can be summarized in the following question: if climate change is invisible, what do scientists mean when suggesting that the IPCC’s report provides ‘a clear scientific view of the current state of knowledge in climate change’?4 Although climate is supposed to be beyond the reach of our senses, we leave in the hands of natural scientists the apparently impossible task of providing a sense of the invisible past and its implications for the future. But how do scientists accomplish this? Based on ethnographic work with geoscientists in West Greenland and Scotland examining how they understand and communicate climate knowledge, this article shows that scientists claim knowledge about climate to themselves by contrasting it to the ephemerality with which non-scientists experience variations in weather – a group iconically represented by the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, who, despite suffering the consequences of global warming, are seen as stranded in present experience and therefore incapable of envisioning climate. Yet, despite scientific efforts to purify climate knowledge by distancing it epistemically from weather experience, I show that scientists rely on short and fast time-scales to make ‘visible’ to the senses the very long and slow – therefore ‘invisible’ – time-scales of earth history. This entanglement of the long and slow (earth’s history) with the short and fast (biography), I argue, challenges widespread narratives of geological time-scales as opposed to the human time-scales of biblical texts (Toulmin & Goodfield 1965) and modern life (May & Thrift 2001). To envision geological time-scales, geoscientists tend to shrink long-term history, relying on processes that define the context in which the everyday practice of modern science evolved, including, for instance, clock-time. Yet I will show that by shrinking earth history, geoscientists have not only allowed for long-term processes to be conceived at a glance, but have also done so at an incredible speed. I term these complementary conceptual moves compression and acceleration, respectively, using the word ‘move’ here, instead of, say, ‘strategy’, to suggest that these conceptualizations do not necessarily follow a preconceived plan but depend on tacit knowledge and enskilment (Ingold 2000). Examining the historical development of these conceptual moves – aiming to ground comparison in anthropology equally in both ethnography and history (Ingold 2011) – I look back to the work of Charles Lyell (1797-1875). Lyell, whose writings continue to inform how British geoscientists, including those I followed, teach the earth’s history, was not only a founder of modern geology but also one of the first British scholars to think systematically about the relationship between past and present changes in earth history. I will show that Lyell used compression and acceleration moves to challenge his detractors often at the cost of dissociating important temporal processes, including Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C Weathering climate 3 the ongoing relationship between environmental change and the adaptation of living organisms. This temporal dissociation, I will argue, corresponds to the epistemic distance from which geoscientists envision their access to long-term environmental history, which coincides significantly with the introduction of optical metaphors in earth sciences, inspired by the invention of the telescope. Yet, as I will show, scalar practices to create epistemic distance do not emancipate scientists from sensory intimacy with the ephemerality of ordinary life. Grasping climate entwines with how scientists have sensorially appropriated their environment throughout history, relying on instruments and technology. Examining the scientific definition of climate from the viewpoint of those most directly affected by it, including Arctic communities, I will challenge subsequently similar definitions adopted by environmental anthropologists, which also tend to reduce ‘indigenous’ knowledge to an experience of the weather (Cruikshank 2005; Ingold & Kurttila 2000).5 In pursing this challenge – and in the face of the current environmental crisis, which invites science and humanities scholars to consider human and geological time-scales simultaneously (Chakrabarty 2014) – I will respond to the recent call to rethink deep time in anthropology, a subject given scant attention by ethnographers, partially owing to a traditional focus on the present (Irvine 2014; also Latour 2014).6 I will propose, in dialogue with traditional and contemporary approaches to the study of time reckoning in anthropology, that indigenous knowledge of weather should be regarded as potentially acclimatized to the long-term environmental knowledge scientists claim for themselves, in the same way that scientific knowledge of climate remains bound to phenomena occurring at the scale of weather. Addressing research with indigenous communities of the Arctic, particularly the Inuit, I will conclude by speculating about alternative understandings of climate knowledge, beyond the climateweather distinction (Nuttall 2009). Inspired by the Inuit notion of sila, I will argue that environmental history should embrace what I term climate becoming: that is, a relational understanding of earth history where knowledge of deep time entangles rhythmically with ordinary life. The argument presented in this article is developed under the assumption that it is ultimately impossible to study pure ontological types, such as naturalism, as these are nowhere to be found (Candea 2012; Ingold 2016). While science is indigenous to its setting, indigenous knowledge is neither pre-scientific nor anti-naturalist. From the viewpoint of the history of scientific virtues, objectivity has never resulted in a total escape from subjectivity, in that both have been crafted historically in tandem, like a single complementary pair (Daston & Galison 2010). As I hope to demonstrate, despite attempts to place a clear epistemic gap between scientific measurement and felt experience, the distinction between climate and weather does not hold pure. For the scientists with whom I work – and presumably for most climate scientists – climate knowledge remains immanent to processes that unfold at the scale of what in science is understood as weather. Far from solid and impermeable, the scientific concept of climate has been weathering through everyday scientific practice. Weather vs climate The starting point of this article coincides with the point where my ethnographic study begins, namely the importance that the geoscientists on my team placed on the climate-weather distinction right at the outset of the project. The ethnographic research reported here was carried out mainly with physical geographers, including Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 4 Cristi án Simonetti four glaciologists and three palaeo-climatologists, as well as two archaeologists, all of whom have been collaborating with five biologists on an interdisciplinary project on climate change (to which I also belong) funded by the University of Aberdeen. Called FAR North (Fragility, Adaptation, and Resilience in the North), this project was established in 2012 in order to foster interdisciplinary collaborations on climate change in northern circumpolar regions and included a mix of academic staff, postdoctoral researchers, and Ph.D. students from the University of Aberdeen. My participation in the project, as a postdoctoral researcher, involved analysing how scientists who collaborate on climate change research understand time and space. I conducted my research through a number of short teaching field trips, meetings, lab visits, and other informal encounters in Scotland since September 2012 with geoscientists from the FAR North team. The research also included periods of intense fieldwork, particularly a month-long trip to West Greenland in the summer season of 2013, with two geoscientists from the same team, to study the retreat of the Kangiata Nunata Sermia (KNS) glacier over the past 18,000 years, along with a number of Norse settlements located in the surrounding valleys. Like Jarraud in the above-mentioned IPCC release in September 2013, a few months earlier the geoscientists on my team had mentioned, without any prompting, the climate-weather divide in our first meeting, emphasizing its relevance for understanding the relationship between science and the general public. The discussion emerged while we were brainstorming potential funding sources that I could apply for in order to conduct fieldwork with them in Greenland. Among the various options, we explored the possibility of submitting a joint interdisciplinary application, incorporating elements of glaciology, palynology, and anthropology. Reflecting on my role, they suggested that most funding bodies and research councils would expect social scientists to concentrate on the impact of climate research in public domains. Still lacking a clear idea of what I had in mind for the project, they repeated a common understanding of the relationship between the natural and social sciences, in which the social sciences are supposed to bridge the gap between the hard knowledge produced by the natural sciences and the soft understanding of the general public. Turning me into their translator between both forms of knowledge, they suggested that the climate-weather divide should be the core of the matter. Although the public is gaining more exposure to the word ‘climate’, most people would not understand its meaning since they lack the appropriate training, the researchers explained. In response to my inquiries, they informed me that this misunderstanding also extended to indigenous communities living in the Arctic, with rare exceptions, such as communities who keep a decadal record of seasonal crop behaviour. Unlike farmers, hunter-gatherers were, according to the researchers, bound to a weather experience. In the words of one of the glaciologists, ‘Without a systematic record, people living in the Arctic, like the Inuit, can’t tell for sure if the transformations they observe are due to climate change’. Soon after this first meeting, I realized that the scientists on my team encountered this tension between scientific and public understandings of climate through their interactions with first-year undergraduate students, a regular and significant point of contact with people coming from outside the university. According to the scientists, most new students in physical geography had a poor understanding of the climate-weather distinction. The scientists usually attributed this knowledge gap to the students’ poor grasp of statistics and probability, as well as their lack of awareness of the different scales at which the geosciences operate – a point often raised in the literature regarding key Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C Weathering climate 5 Climate Weather Long time-scale (several decades) Short time-scale (minutes, hours, and days) Measured indirectly (durable) Perceived directly (ephemeral) Representational (chronological) Presentational (cyclical) Modern Traditional Hard knowledge Soft knowledge Figure 1. Comparison between the concepts of climate and weather from the viewpoint of science. concepts such as deep time (e.g. Gould 1987: 3). Owing to the careless use of the term in the media, most novices, in the view of the scientists, struggled to realize that climate change depended on careful measurement and analysis across vast temporal and spatial expanses. For the physical geographers on my team, the climate-weather distinction, as stated in our first meeting, roughly corresponds to the parameters that define what Latour (1993) calls the ‘modern constitution’, a failed attempt to purify Western thought by separating nature and culture. Compared to the long-term scales of climate, which are measured over several decades, ephemeral weather conditions are directly perceived to vary throughout the day. An achievement of modern science, climate knowledge allows humanity to understand the past and predict the future. However, this departure from the constraints of present experience, where traditional knowledge is supposed to reside, does not correspond to a complete negation of the senses. As Shapin (1996) argues, with regard to the values that emerged in the crafting of the ‘scientific revolution’, the accomplishments of modern science are often attributed to a methodical domestication of the senses, as well as their enhancement through instruments like the telescope. Accordingly, the invisible climate has become ‘visible’ in another sense, partially through disciplined observation and recording. No longer dependent on a presentational encounter with the environment, guided by memory and perception, knowledge in science becomes representational, allowing the eyes to scrutinize long-term history at a single, effortless glance, at the cost of reducing its original complexity (Simonetti 2018). Chronological representations have turned the ephemeral into something concrete that, as it endures, summarizes the invisible history of climate (see Fig. 1). As I hope to demonstrate in the following sections, views of the past that climate scientists perform are not purely objective images of long-term history but depend on scales unfolding at the level of sentient experience. It is worth noting that although the material analysed in the coming sections of this article focuses mainly on how geoscientists think and communicate about time, its conclusions complement what other authors have convincingly argued regarding spatial scales, especially with regard to the analytical impossibility of ultimately dissociating time and space (Massey 2005). According to Latour (2005), the ideas of the global and the local are not ‘givens’ in the practice of science. They have to be performed, which highlights their mutual dependency (see Carr & Lempert 2016). Accordingly, following Jónsdóttir’s analysis of scaling practices in climate science, ‘the part and the whole thus co-emerge and Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 6 Cristi án Simonetti mutually constitute each other’ (2013: 132; also Skrydstrup 2009). Such co-emergence contradicts the tendency to conflate both the global with universal nature – objectively accessed from nowhere – and the local with anecdotal subjective experience (Tsing 2005). Although scientific and indigenous forms of knowledge might not be equally localized, both instances remain local, in the sense of being intimately situated in practice (Raffles 2002). Accordingly, while scientific observation has never been post-sensorial, sensing has never been basic or instinctual (O’Reilly 2016: 27). In following this line of argument, I suggest that scientific views of climate history constitute sentient narratives. Here, I expand on the argument developed by the philosopher Robert Frodeman (2003). In this argument, scientific knowledge of the earth should not be understood as based on the objectivity that the geosciences seek to borrow from the traditional conception of physics, but as historical in nature and, therefore, primarily narrative in structure. Bearing this in mind, the argument I develop in the following sections should be seen as complementary also to what Helmreich (2009: 171) describes – in his analysis of how marine microbiologists create a global genome from a patchily sampled ocean – as the production of scalar narratives. According to Helmreich, such scalar narratives, a term originally borrowed from the geosciences, would be marked by a process he calls abduction, a local operation that scales data up and down, erasing all the particularities of the settings that originally gave rise to the samples collected. Nevertheless, no relations are destined to remain fixed in the production of scientific knowledge (Mol & Law 1994). At the same time, no abduction is performed without leaving its traces (Helmreich 2009). Through an analysis of how long-term processes are narrated by climate geoscientists, the next section follows a slightly different, but equally important, set of flows and traces, namely those that relate to temporal processes unfolding at the level of sentient experience, which, by scientific standards, are excluded from the definition of climate. My aim is to show some of the inconsistencies that emerge and the hybrids that proliferate as geoscientists working on climate attempt to separate different forms of knowledge, particularly scientific and indigenous, by crafting time. Compression and acceleration Compared to their interaction with students, in settings ranging from classrooms to training field trips, the geoscientists on my team seemed to have little empirical (ethnographic) evidence to support their claim that indigenous communities confuse the climate-weather distinction. Most had no significant acquaintances from the local communities in the Arctic regions where they had conducted fieldwork, in some cases for decades. When I accompanied my associates – an established glaciologist and an advanced Ph.D. student in the same field – on the trip to study the KNS glacier, it became evident that over the years they had actively avoided locals in the area which, I learned in our conversations, was a common tendency among their colleagues. As I was excited, back in 2013, about my first visit to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital and our port of arrival, my initial impulse was to have a look around the city and try to meet some Greenlanders. My associates immediately advised against this idea, noting their unpleasant past experiences with locals in the bars of Nuuk, who tended to infringe on an ‘acceptable’ boundary of physical separation, often by talking in extreme proximity to one’s face. Generally speaking, Nuuk appeared uncivilized to my associates, which they expressed precisely in those terms. When asked explicitly whether they had made Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 Weathering climate 7 any friends over the years, they answered negatively and could recount only a handful of pleasant conversations with random locals. When we went out for a brief trip to the supermarket, I soon noticed that the attention of the geoscientists lay elsewhere. As we walked back along the edge of town, close to Nuuk’s bright red and white cathedral, the senior glaciologist stopped to point out a number of scars in Greenland’s ancient – likely Precambrian – bedrock, produced by rocks carried by a glacier in the past. Owing to their disciplinary training, the human component, which at that point had captured my attention, seemed somewhat irrelevant to the scientists. Their interest lay not so much in humans as in the long history of interaction between ice, land, and sea. People’s recent participation in such history was beyond their attention. Signs of this anti-human attitude surfaced again and again as we departed by boat the next morning to begin our journey east to KNS, through the valley of Austmannadalen. My companions often expressed their joy in encountering nature and would recall all of the things that we take for granted in the urbanized world, such as, for instance, access to tap water. Now in the field, we had to procure our own water from streams. They actively attempted to preserve what they saw as this pre-cultural landscape through a number of subtle gestures, such as collecting waste left by former visitors, or preserving the aesthetics of the location by covering their tracks as they dug holes to inspect stratigraphic sequences and collect samples. Similarly, encounters with other people were often a source of discontent for the researchers, as occurred after we came across a couple of locals travelling through the Austmannadalen on a caribou hunt. Although during the journey we relied significantly on the movements of hunters and caribou – whose cairns and footprints, respectively, guided our entry into the valley – my companions lacked interest in human contact. Perhaps the most significant human-related topic which the glaciologists enjoyed discussing during the journey were heroic tales of deceased polar explorers, including that of Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), who had completed the first crossing of Greenland more than a century earlier, exiting via the valley that we were now entering. As with many stories of famous adventurers, the polar explorers’ dependence on local enskilment went unacknowledged. Nansen (1890), for example, relied on the expertise of two Lapps whom he took along for his Greenland crossing. The anti-human focus which I observed in the attitudes of these glaciologists aligns strongly with how the geosciences have traditionally engaged with long-term processes through an objective detachment from the scalar limitations of human perception, in which religious beliefs have historically flourished. Since their inception as modern disciplines, mainly during the nineteenth century, the earth sciences have been marked by an effort to expand the planet’s history beyond the constraints of the short time-spans in biblical texts (Toulmin & Goodfield 1965). Secularization in science was somewhat literally the most significant thought that the senior glaciologist on the expedition took along in the field. Prior to our departure, we agreed that each of us would take just one book for recreational reading in case of bad weather, bearing in mind that we would have to carry the full weight of our expedition gear through the valley. The book my companion picked was Richard Dawkins’s The God delusion (2006), which calls for the eradication of religious beliefs from science. Nonetheless, as I pondered the actual distance between feeling and knowing in glaciologists’ understanding of climate, I soon noticed that the ways my companions understood long-term processes were only partial departures from sensory experience. Perhaps my attention was subtly guided by my own book choice, Robert Macfarlane’s Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 8 Cristi án Simonetti Mountains of the mind (2008), which speaks implicitly of an indissoluble relationship between knowing, feeling, and spirituality in glaciology. When I discussed the issue openly with the senior glaciologist, as we looked at signs of the KNS glacier’s retreat in the last 18,000 years, he spontaneously brought up some conceptual moves that he performs while working with large negative numbers in the earth’s history. According to him, numbers remain meaningless until he translates them into more easily graspable processes, such as his own age. In his words, ‘If an event in earth’s history occurred, say, 10,000 years ago, and I am 40 years old, then 10,000 means 250 times my own life’. Knowing earth’s history required a biographical feel for deep time. Back from Greenland, I soon encountered similar conceptual moves as I accompanied other members of the team on their regular visits to post-glacial landscapes around Scotland. Walking on Forvie Sands, a coastal landscape in Aberdeenshire that has been partially shaped by changes in the sea level over the past 12,000 years, a senior geographer on the team described how he lectures about the relationship between climate change and catastrophic events in the North Sea, particularly a tsunami that occurred in the north Shetland Islands some 8,000 years ago. Mentioning the difficulties his students experience in grasping the significance of such large numbers in earth’s history, he said he encourages them to imagine 200 generations lined up in front of them, as you might count back the generations in the Old Testament, tracing lines of descent narrated in its corpus. With an average lifespan of 40 years per generation, 200 people would roughly correspond to the number which the students are trying to grasp. According to the geographer, ‘I can’t relate to 8,000. I can’t even see the difference between 350 and 400 in a lecture room, but I can see the difference between 150 and 200. I do not know what 8,000 looks like, but I do know how 200 looks’. What the conceptual moves described above reveal is that the geoscientists on my team rely on short-term processes that are closer to everyday experience, with the result that deep time is somewhat compressed. In tracking examples of these moves, a particularly significant one emerges in the visual language of the geosciences, namely the widespread use of a clock to narrate the history of the earth (see Fig. 2). The glaciology Ph.D. student pointed this out for me spontaneously in a conversation after our return from Greenland. In this image, the earth’s 4.6 billion years of history are compressed into the twelve hours on a clock face, with the first four characterized by the absence of life, the following seven by the emergence of simple life forms, the last hour by the appearance of vertebrates, and only a few seconds of the last minute before 12 o’clock by the emergence of humans. In this approach, what is beyond the reach of our senses – since no organism has ever lived for billions of years – is suddenly reduced to the well-known daily cycle of a common time-measuring device. Once again, this compression results in a sudden acceleration. Billions, millions, and thousands of years change into hours, minutes, and seconds. The history of the earth, life, and humanity suddenly runs at an incredible speed, and what seemed initially graspable, namely the time-span for those living in the present, is now so short that it becomes imperceptible, unfolding in nanoseconds. As when physicists move from the astronomical expanses of the cosmos to the minuscule world of particle physics in their attempts to understand the origin of the universe through light speed, geoscientists find themselves at times looking at long-term processes as if under a microscope.7 The use of the clock image to explain geological time is remarkable given that, in the literature on time, clock time and deep time seem somehow opposed. There is a sense in which the vast expanse of geological time works as an antidote to the increasing Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C Weathering climate 9 Figure 2. Geology clock. Reproduced from Chapman & Robson (1994). (Photograph: Rupert C 1994 Gillian Chapman.) Horrox. Design: Gillian Chapman. ! speed of modern life. In Western societies, a great compression and acceleration in the experience of time and space has been attributed to technological advances in transportation and communication during the Industrial Revolution, both of which were co-ordinated by the clock (Harvey 1990). Social scientists studying clock time have regarded the geosciences’ anti-human reminder of our recent arrival in this world as working against the acceleration triggered by clock time. An example is the work of the sociologist John Urry (2000) and his concept of glacial time, referring – like deep time – to long-term processes that operate at a geological scale. Partially based on Gurvitch’s (1964) distinction between enduring (long-term) and explosive (short-term) times in social life, Urry’s ‘glacial time resists both the clock and the nanosecond’ (2000: 130). What the idea of glacial time suggests (see May & Thrift 2001: 12) is that throughout the nineteenth century, geoscientists’ conception of time was diametrically opposed to that of other members of industrial societies. Whereas, for the latter, time had been shrinking, for geologists, time had been expanding. However, what Urry calls glacial time is far from opposed to industrial life, as the image of the geology clock suggests. In Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 10 Cristi án Simonetti theory, something similar occurs with climate. Clock time played an important role in the highly distributed process that, during the British Enlightenment, allowed for the domestication of weather phenomena through the establishment of long-term climate records (Golinski 2003). Understanding long processes beyond present experience required that scientists attend to shorter processes, a phenomenon that can be traced to contemporary geosciences. An example is the formalization of the Anthropocene, the term proposed for our current geological epoch to denote humanity as a causal force operating at a global scale. Among geologists leading the debate, knowing deep time results again in a compression process that allows one to imagine the earth’s history ‘in a pebble’, by narrating the trajectories of the minerals contained within it (Zalasiewicz 2010). Similarly, the Anthropocene has been defined by a great acceleration in fossil fuel emissions, triggered historically by the very same developments in transportation and communication that compressed the earth and which were co-ordinated by the clock, particularly Watt’s steam engine in 1784 (Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen & McNeill 2011; also Crutzen 2002).8 Temporal dissociations Charles Lyell, who played a key role in the expansion of earth’s history and initiated important debates on the relevance of the present for studying the past, performed moves similar to those described above. In challenging the tendency to invoke supernatural forces, common in a dominant theory in the nineteenth century known as catastrophism, Lyell proposed concentrating on the forces operating in the present in order to understand changes in the past. This idea, which goes back to James Hutton (1726-97), recognized as one of the first modern geologists to expand earth history, became known as uniformitarianism. In his Principles of geology, Lyell developed a series of arguments that systematically played with compression and acceleration (1990 [1830]: 79). In doing so, he produced a fast-motion effect that somehow antedates the cinema, another technological development that, through its original hand-cranked technology, had an impact on what Kern calls our modern sense of ‘differential speed’ (1983: 130).9 For example, in challenging certain mistakes in the quantification of time, Lyell argued the following: He who should study the monuments of the natural world under the influence of a similar infatuation, must draw a no less exaggerated picture of the energy and violence of causes, and must experience the same insurmountable difficulty in reconciling the former and the present state of nature . . . We know that one earthquake may raise the coast of Chili for a hundred miles to the average height of about five feet. A repetition of two thousand shocks of equal violence might produce a mountain chain one hundred miles long, and ten thousand feet high. Now, should one only of these convulsions happen in a century, it would be consistent with the order of events experienced by Chileans from the earliest times; but if the whole of them were to occur in the next hundred years, the entire district must be depopulated, scarcely any animals or plants could survive, and the surface would be one confused heap of ruin and desolation (1990 [1830]: 79-80). In challenging catastrophism, Lyell compresses and accelerates centuries of environmental history in Chile, an earthquake-prone country, into a hundred years, giving it a sudden dramatism. What for a moment seems like a sequence of discrete events is now filled with emotion, particularly for the poor Chileans at the mercy of the catastrophists. These theorists had confused the magnitudes of time by explaining slow changes in earth history though sudden catastrophes, such as the deluge famously narrated in the Bible. However, by envisioning the past as a malleable succession of events ‘beheld in one Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C Weathering climate 11 view’ in front of the observer, Lyell seems to not only compress and accelerate this past. Rather, to perform his dramatic play, he also has to dissociate different temporal processes that would otherwise be concurrent. The same group of Chileans remains while a long sequence of earthquakes occurs at an incredible speed, even though, in reality, many generations would have passed over that period. An article from the scientific magazine Polarfronten, which I encountered in Copenhagen as I returned with my companions from Greenland, further illustrates how this differential speed is enacted. Titled ‘Polar bears on thin ice’, and published by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology, and Innovation, it discussed how the ice was quickly receding in Hudson Bay, Canada, and in Baffin Bay, West Greenland. Accompanied by the image of a polar bear floating around thin layers of sea ice, it read: ‘Here the ice is already today breaking up earlier and forming again very late, and this will, according to the prognoses, only get worse during the century and thereby slowly pull the ice away from under the bears completely’ (Philbert 2009: 9). The sense of motion conveyed in this short passage, particularly within the context of the wider article, is immense. The fast melting of the ice demands a quick international response. However, in the course of a century, this acceleration remains imperceptible unless we measure it. Interestingly, the passage leaves us with the image of polar bears floating in the water, as if the ice were like a carpet that is suddenly pulled out from under their paws. In just a few lines, and for the purpose of getting across a message about the urgency of global warming, different temporal processes, such as ice melting and polar bear adaptation, are suddenly dissociated from one another. As occurred with Lyell, both run in disjunction. It is worth noting that a similar form of dissociation can be observed in many scientific and non-scientific arguments about the urgency of climate change and the challenges it poses for the adaptation of indigenous communities in the Arctic, who tend to be portrayed, along with polar bears, as icons of global warming (Bravo 2009; Slocum 2004). Unlike ‘modern’ humans, indigenous communities are depicted as being closer to a Western image of a passive natural world and are therefore represented as incapable of anticipation, as if they were living in a constant present. This narrative of the ‘Endangered Other’ manifests itself in widely used concepts such as vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience (Hall & Sanders 2015). Taken together, these concepts disseminate images of Arctic communities as passive victims of climate change (Hastrup 2009), which coincides with a recent proliferation of environmentally deterministic arguments in the social sciences (Nielsen & Sejersen 2012). Interestingly, this image of Endangered Others as dissociated from the ongoing transformations of their environments somewhat mirrors the epistemic distance, addressed earlier, by which climate science distinguishes climate and weather. Through the formulation of hypotheses that sequentially define the world before encountering it, knowing in science results primarily from isolating observers from their environment. Although active when compared to their ‘pre-modern’ counterparts, modern humans also remain exhabitants of their environments, mechanically trapped in a punctuated access to life, determined by the corroboration of pre-formulated plans. Yet, as Ingold (2000) argues, humans do not share an exterior relationship with their environment predetermined by mental representations. They inhabit their environment from inside a process of becoming, which in principle extends to all organisms living on this planet (see also Oyama, Griffiths & Gray 2001). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 12 Cristi án Simonetti Returning to the scientific study of climate change, compression and acceleration seem inescapable each time geoscientists narrate the past and predict the future. The latter can be observed again, for example, in the IPCC summary reports for policy-makers (IPCC 2014). These reports are highly dependent on tables and graphs that summarize, at a single glance, the history of climate. As such, the clarity of the visual representations in the reports is partially responsible for the success of intergovernmental agreements and actions. Bearing in mind the complex history of the crafting of scientific virtues, objectivity converges with quantification, in this particular case, in an effort to reach a consensus on numbers in statistical modelling.10 This confluence between objectivity and statistic modelling converges nowadays in what Chakrabarty describes as the ‘regime of probabilistic thinking’, where societies and their environments are managed constantly ‘by calculating risks and assigning probability values to them’ (2014: 4). Yet, although tables and graphs are supposed to summarize a scientific consensus on climate change by using data gathered ‘objectively’ by scientific groups across the globe, as if from nowhere, these visual aids do also engage in storytelling (Barnes & Dove 2015: 3; also Jasanoff 2010). While scientists see the averages in the IPCC report’s graphs and tables as less biased and more objective than the words which interpret them, the numbers implicitly carry an intellectual pedigree that turns them into politically loaded entities. Tensions over the political significance of such a pedigree are exemplified by the ‘tone of accountability, even auditing’, that is implicitly adopted in relation to numbers by the peer review process which sustains the scientific consensus (see O’Reilly 2015: 111; also Hulme 2009). Nonetheless, like the hand gestures the glaciologists on my team performed daily as we walked the Austmannadalen to sketch the retreat of KNS in our imaginations, the lines connecting averages in the IPCC graphs would provide a sketch of the invisible past and unknown future. Based on the terminology introduced in the reports, these lines constitute scenarios or paths, which in the context of the IPCC summary report for policy-makers highlight critical events, such as dangerous thresholds or tipping points. All of these events allow us to envision probable futures in the present which can be catastrophic. Again, amid these compressed paths of averaged points, connected after being frozen in time and space, it is hard to imagine the pace of time’s passage for particular living organisms experiencing those climatic changes. Climate optics The narration of the long term and the invisible in time via compression and acceleration, described in the previous section, is dominated by optical metaphors. This is unsurprising given optics’ key role in helping science to transcend everyday perception, with the development of macroscopic and microscopic devices providing access to the very large and the very small. Key examples include the widespread notions of scale and resolution, borrowed from optics, which have become common tools for understanding global phenomena, including climate change, and their local effects (Simonetti 2019). Geoscientists on my team used them in our conversations to contrast the chronologies on which the different disciplines involved in the project operated. Events concerning biologists and archaeologists (not to mention anthropologists) would seem irrelevant at the vast scales on which geoscientists work owing to a loss in resolution. Such optical images can be traced back to the early days of geological thinking in Britain, once again in the work of Lyell (1990 [1830]: 84-5), who in other passages Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C Weathering climate 13 from his critique of catastrophism used analogies from astronomy. According to Rudwick, a historian of geology, the above-mentioned argument used by Lyell against catastrophism can be described as a twist that ‘telescopes events together, giving an illusion of swift and extraordinary happenings and astonishing coincidences’ (1990: xviii, my emphasis). Rudwick’s description is not surprising, considering how the telescope image has influenced geological thinking. Many early geologists viewed discoveries in astronomy, particularly Galileo’s invention of the telescope, as astonishing scientific accomplishments that were worth imitating, and that expanded the narrow geocentric perspectives of medieval times. Lyell, for example, at the end of the third volume of Principles, explicitly compared the expansion of space in astronomy with the expansion of time in geology (1991 [1833]: 384-5). More broadly, the title of Lyell’s masterpiece, Principles of geology, echoes astronomer Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica. Accordingly, among historians of geology, there has been a tendency to see a progression from the discoveries of astronomy, which expanded our conception of the universe, to the discoveries of geology, which expanded our understanding of earth’s age (see, e.g., Rudwick 1990; Toulmin & Goodfield 1965). Moreover, returning to the image of the geological clock, the expansion of the universe in physics also involved compression and acceleration through downscaling. For example, Newton came to be known as responsible for developing the influential image of a clockwork universe.11 In contemporary contexts, optical images define not only our understandings of time but even the practice of physical geography itself. This became evident during my fieldwork in West Greenland as the glaciologists attempted to identify a series of moraines – accumulations of unconsolidated sediments transported and deposited by a glacier – marking a former calving point of KNS, probably some 8,000 years before the present. The senior glaciologist, who was introducing me to some of these moraine features, jokingly asked me, because of my inexperience, whether I had adjusted my spectacles. This reminded me of similar jokes I had heard from archaeologists in Aberdeen at the start of my project. For example, one of them had asked whether I was planning to put scientists under the microscope. Another suggested I might grab a telescope, realizing that as a social scientist my office is located in a building far away from where most of the geoscientists worked. A visual focus permeated both their and my own approach to knowledge. Joking aside, geoscientists often rely on optical devices to conduct fieldwork, and microscopes frequently appear in the profile pictures that the geoscientists on my team used for their university websites. It is worth noting that the glaciologists I work with tend to focus on the history of individual glaciers, such as KNS, rather than extrapolating global climate trends from bubbles trapped stratigraphically inside ice cores (see O’Reilly 2016). In this context, data collection depends on both walking the landscape and skilled vision. The field expedition I joined in 2013 is an example. Although it paled in comparison to the trips that locals regularly undertake, we had to cross the Austmannadalen valley, which is 20 kilometres in length, a number of times, carrying all of our gear, food, and scientific instruments, and climbing steep hills, before reaching the KNS glacier. In doing so, we had to carry supplies back and forth between various camps that we had set up along the valley. Reaching remote areas like this often requires significant physical exertion, which resonates with the relationship between muscularity and masculinity that some of the founding fathers of glaciology, including John Tyndall (1820-93), defended as key to establishing scientific authority, particularly the capacity to see things at first hand (Carey, Jackson, Antonello & Rushing 2016; Hevly 1996). Such physical Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 14 Cristi án Simonetti Figure 3. Glaciologists using binoculars to search for clues of the KNS glacier’s retreat, West Greenland, 2013. (Photo by the author.) demands emerged from an interest in remote places at high altitudes and latitudes, and a fascination with vistas, all of which are crucial aspects of the contemporary science of glaciology (see Macfarlane 2008). Part of our daily routine in Greenland, as we walked along the Austmannadalen searching for clues about the retreat of KNS, was hiking and stopping at such vistas, which glaciologists often inspected with binoculars (Fig. 3). This fascination with vistas and the use of optical metaphors for the quality of scientific observation can again be traced to the early days of modern geological thinking. An example comes from a scientific cartoon. Henry De la Beche (17961855), the first professional geoscientist appointed to a full-time position by the British government in 1835, engaged in a long-running debate with Lyell over certain aspects of his theory of uniformitarianism, in particular the idea that extinct species of reptiles might emerge again in the future. Combining his artistic talents with his knowledge of geology, De la Beche drew cartoons to satirize Lyell’s theories. Figure 4 is an example. Produced around 1831, the cartoon shows a lawyer, presumably representing Lyell, who had a background in law, carrying theories as legal documents while instructing a puzzled practitioner of the discipline, presumably a stand-in for De la Beche. Standing on ground labelled ‘Theory’ that offers a spectacular vista, the lawyer explains his world-view to the practitioner while also handing him a pair of spectacles that distort the other’s understanding of earth’s history (Rudwick 1975). For the practitioner, with a hammer in his hand and a collecting bag on his shoulder, knowledge does not grow out of pre-given principles that colour perception but comes from felt engagement with geological formations through practice. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C Weathering climate 15 Figure 4. ‘Take a view, my dear Sir, through these glasses, and you will see that the whole face of nature is as blue as indigo’. Image part of a collection donated by Mr Hugh O’Neill, Reproduced with C UKRI permission of British Geological Survey Permit Number EA19/003 British Geological Survey ! 2019. All rights reserved. This optical approach to earth’s history is supported by the privileged status assigned to vision in the West (see Classen 1997; Howes 2006; Jay 1993). Although certainty in modern philosophy is accomplished through a partial mistrust of the senses, vision has become the sense par excellence for generating knowledge, which follows a long tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle. For example, Descartes, who witnessed some of the technological advances of astronomy and was fascinated by the telescope, suggested at the beginning of his Optics that ‘since sight is the noblest and most comprehensive of the senses, inventions which serve to increase its powers are undoubtedly among the most useful there can be’ (1965 [1637]: 65). Accordingly, while vision became the icon of the detached understanding of scientific objectivity, access to the absent in time and space became guided by optics (see Daston & Galison 2010; Simonetti 2019). Such optical access to knowledge explains why the ‘scientific revolution’ that supposedly guided us into modernity also came to be described by early historians of science as equivalent to putting on a new pair of spectacles (Shapin 1996: 2). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 16 Cristi án Simonetti Acclimatizing weather In recent years, the climate-weather dichotomy – defined by the above-described optical distance – has played an important role in defining the relationship between science and those most directly affected by climate change, including indigenous communities. Questions about the relationship between scientific and indigenous forms of knowledge have become particularly prominent in interdisciplinary efforts to define the extent to which indigenous knowledge can contribute to the generation and perfection of climate models, as a ‘forum article’ by Diemberger et al. (2012) shows. It includes two leading sections by Hastrup, an anthropologist, and Schaffer, a historian of science, which are commented on by fourteen leading social and natural scientists working on climate change. The joint comments by Hobbs, an anthropologist, and Davis, a biologist, on the potential use of the milkbird’s changing seasonal patterns as a climate proxy by AmdoTibetans – owing to the progressively earlier arrival and intensification of summers as a result of climate change – illustrate the existing tensions between indigenous and scientific knowledge. In an account of the disciplinary challenges involved in their collaboration, Hobbs and Davis explained how ‘Davis [the biologist] ultimately concluded that local [indigenous] observation was not reliable enough for inclusion within the scientific method’ (in Diemberger et al. 2012: 236). In an interesting reply to the comments, Schaffer briefly identifies what for him is the core of the matter, namely the poorly understood distinction between climate and weather that underlies most comments in the article, including those by Hobbs and Davis. His point of departure is a distinction between weather and climate introduced by Ingold and Kurttila (2000) in their work with the Saami in Finnish Lapland, as well as its subsequent adoption by Cruikshank (2005) in her study of narratives of glaciers in the Saint Elias Mountains in Alaska. According to Ingold and Kurttila (2000), followed by Cruikshank (2005), indigenous knowledge is unlikely to provide ‘data’ to science, mainly because of their different approaches to weather and climate. Whereas science is mainly concerned with changes in climate, ‘an abstraction compounded from a number of variables (temperature, precipitation, air pressure, windspeed, etc.) that are isolated for the purpose of measurement’, indigenous people are concerned with changes in weather, which ‘is about what it feels like to be warm or cold, drenched in rain, caught in a storm and so on’ (Ingold & Kurttila 2000: 187). Put succinctly, for Ingold and Kurttila, ‘climate is recorded, weather is experienced’ (2000: 187; see also Cruikshank 2005). Although these authors have critically engaged with the separation between nature and culture, which underlies the climate-weather distinction, and have explicitly attempted to symmetrically place science alongside indigenous knowledge by regarding both as dependent on enskilment, they seem to replicate scientific discourse in some ways. By reducing indigenous knowledge to weather, Ingold, Kurttila, and Cruikshank run the risk of reducing it to all that is ephemeral in the environment, denying communities access to the long-term history recorded in the landscape. This includes phenomena that physical geographers detect visually as they conduct fieldwork, such as the features that glaciers leave as they advance or retreat.12 It is as if indigenous peoples were bound to what occurs in the proximity of their bodies, or to what it feels like being in a particular environment, while scientists are measuring from afar all that endures and solidifies in the landscape. Using an analogy from the Greenlandic environment, the distinction proposed by Ingold and Kurttila invites us to conclude that while scientists concentrate on solid masses of ice as they advance and retreat, indigenous narratives are bound to the snow that falls and compacts every year. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C Weathering climate 17 According to Irvine (2014), part of the reason why anthropologists have struggled to recognize deep time in indigenous knowledge is their tendency to regard indigenous communities as bound to an ahistorical present. A number of anthropologists have made similar points regarding the temporality of indigenous economics, colonial discourse, and ethnographic practices. Sahlins (1972), for instance, pointed out that a common misconception about hunter-gatherers is that they are incapable of anticipation, and are caught in a constant struggle for survival under limited resources. Complementarily, Fabian (1983) demonstrated how ethnographic accounts of the Other, traditionally written in the present tense, have historically regarded oral traditions as living fossils of a Western pre-historical past. Along with ‘pre-modern peoples’, women and children would also be frozen in the ongoing cycles of nature (see also Said 1978). Grounding this assumption is a dual tendency to reduce history to the production of written texts and subsequently to separate human history from natural history. The path opened by Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) notion of aecological time, developed on the basis of how the Nuer of Sudan recounted agnatic relations in conversation with the landscape, has been rightly identified by Irvine as an alternative to the traditional oblivion of deep time in anthropology. Yet Evans-Pritchard’s understanding of time suffers from similar narratives of Western exceptionalism. According to him, the Nuer’s time reckoning resulted from a progressive dissociation of what he called structural time – a set of conventional social institutions built around kinship – from aecological time – the cyclical rhythms of the environment. The tradition in which Evans-Pritchard wrote, often traced back to Durkheim’s (1915: 11) formulation of sociology’s subject of study, was grounded precisely on Durkheim’s distinction between humans’ everyday sense of time and the category of time (Gell 1992; Munn 1992). While the former fell under the jurisdiction of disciplines such as psychology or biology – in that humans experience the passing of time universally – the latter became the rightful subject of sociological analysis: a supra-individual institution relative to a culture, such as ritual calendars bound to environmental phenomena, adding unprecedentedly to the order of nature. From this evolutionary point of view – on which much of the post-Durkheim study of time reckoning rested and that culminated with the arrival of Western science’s epistemic distance – oral traditions would have stayed closer to the sense of time that humans share with the Kingdom Animalia, as opposed to the category of time (Simonetti 2018). Nonetheless, there is no reason, in principle, to believe that indigenous peoples’ temporal understandings are limited to phenomena such as wind, rain, and snow, as if they were incapable of seeing the transformations that glacial ice undergoes and its impacts on the land as it retreats. As Cruikshank (2005) reports in her study, indigenous narratives of glacial landscapes that are passed down through generations systematically highlight some of the most durable aspects of the environment. In that sense, indigenous knowledge is not bound by definition to oral traditions of the ephemeral, but could in principle extend to an awareness of the tangible aspects that hard scientists study. It’s crucial to acknowledge here – and this applies to both geoscientists and indigenous peoples – how deep time constitutes an aspect ‘of the phenomenal world’, in that ‘[it] exists not simply as an abstract concept of the physical sciences’ but as ‘something that impacts on people at the level of experience’ (Irvine 2014: 164). My aim in challenging the distinction between climate and weather which upholds the dichotomy between scientific and indigenous knowledge is not to transform indigenous knowledge into a proto-science capable of collecting data, as Crate has Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 18 Cristi án Simonetti suggested by arguing that most indigenous people practising subsistence are by default ‘ethnoclimatologists . . . with a continuous stream of experiential data’ (2009: 146). This is the confusion Ingold and Kurttila (2000) seem keen to challenge, for good anticolonial reasons. Therefore, I would not wish to deny the differences between scientific and indigenous knowledge of the environment, nor how they relate to the effort that scientists expend to accurately measure climate. My aim is to show that departing from an abstract distinction between felt weather and measured climate is insufficient for understanding both. Climate becomings But how should the relationship between science and indigenous knowledge be understood beyond the climate-weather distinction? Perhaps a fruitful approach is to start by contrasting the ways different climate sciences and indigenous communities think of environmental history. I am unable to base my reflections on long-term research conducted with indigenous communities, particularly the Inuit, whose knowledge of the environment was contrasted with scientific understandings by the very glaciologists I accompanied to Greenland. However, comparative insights from ethnographers who have conducted long-term field research provide material that indicates alternatives for understanding the differences between indigenous and scientific understandings of environmental history. A promising point of departure is Nuttall’s (2009) description of how the Inuit of West Greenland understand environmental history, which resonates with Ingold’s more recent work on lines (2015), as well as that of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). According to Nuttall, the Inuit do not understand variations in climate as scientists do. For them, the environment is in an ongoing process of becoming, which coincides with their preparedness for the unexpected and their view of the world as one of constant surprise (Tejsner 2013; also Briggs 1991). This contrasts with the scientific understanding of change, which starts by plotting averaged periods on a graph, based on a normalized image of climate, the illusory stability of which allowed humanity to flourish and supposedly become modern during the Holocene (Hulme 2010). In that sense, while we are worried that the climate is suddenly turning into an unstable phenomenon, for the Inuit the environment has in a sense always been, and continues to be, in perpetual motion. In other words, while science concentrates on difference, the Inuit, according to Nuttall’s description, seem to emphasize ongoingness, which constitute two radically contrasting points of departure. Imagine for a moment, following Nuttall’s contrasts, what a scientific research program in climate becoming, as opposed to climate change, would look like. Science would have to start elsewhere, probably by getting rid of what Bergson described long ago as ‘cinematographic habits of the [scientific] intellect’ (1998 [1907]: 312). Science, in its constant thirst to measure and to represent events chronologically, would fracture processes into discrete instants, resembling a series of sequentially aligned photograms. Furthermore, scientists would have to challenge the idea of climate as something we expect beyond sensory experience, which, according to Lovejoy and Schertzer (2013), is already happening, although hopefully not as a mere reaction to the acceleration of modern life within which climate is also caught (see also Hulme 2010; 2017). Taken radically, such an imagined science would have to acknowledge that what scientists know about long-term history is inseparable from all the temporal aspects that compose their ordinary life. Ultimately, scientists do not manage to completely dry themselves off when attempting to step out momentarily from the stream along which a discipline Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C Weathering climate 19 flows. Like Arctic communities, scientists are indigenous to their practical and historical settings. The Inuit notion of sila, also addressed by Nuttall (2009), offers some clues as to what climate becoming might look like. Standing for both weather and climate, breath and atmosphere, sila is neither here nor there, neither internal nor external, but both. Through breathing, organisms and their environment become an entangled rhythmic unity. By contrast, measuring and averaging variables in climate science requires that the atmosphere be abstracted from the processes that make it possible in the first place, including all ongoing metabolic exchanges that occur between the atmosphere, the soil below it, and the living organisms that dwell in between (Ingold 2015). The distinction that weather scientists make, for instance, between felt temperature and measured temperature, or climate scientists’ differentiation between weather and climate, which this article has concentrated on, are clear examples of this atmospheric abstraction. As concepts, both weather and climate fail ecologically. For the Inuit of West Greenland, weather and climate are not variables out there to be measured and averaged, but result from an ongoing rhythmic exchange across substances – between earth and sky, organisms and their environment. Such a view of the atmosphere coincides with how, among indigenous communities across the Arctic, climate change is experienced as things acting strangely, as if they were coming out of sync, as when species and ice respectively arrive and retreat earlier than usual (Ingold & Kurttila 2000; Krause 2012; see also Callison 2014). Accordingly, deep time for the Inuit is not a ready-made phenomenon, out there waiting to be observed, but a relational one. As I hope to have demonstrated, the latter is not entirely different from how scientists understand climate, although to scientists this relationality often passes unperceived. The analysis provided above shows how knowledge of the very long term and slow in science has historically entangled with a capacity to master the very short term and fast. Geoscientists have managed to expand long-term environmental history by compressing and accelerating it, relying on shorter processes related to intimate aspects of scientific life, often at the cost of dissociating temporal processes that should otherwise run together. This crafting of time challenges the climate-weather distinction, particularly the idea of climate as something produced objectively through detached measurement and recording. When climate scientists highlight the impressive climatic changes of the last 200 years by, for example, describing them as the ‘blink of an eye in geological terms’ (e.g. Smith 2010: 3), climate is not just an abstract measurement that is by definition beyond experience. Knowing climate requires having a sense for ephemeral processes, including those biographical traits which geoscientists have shared throughout the history of their discipline, from the blink of an eye to the span between the birth and death of their colleagues, under switching lenses or the ticking clock. This would extend in theory to other sciences that study the past, such as astronomy and evolutionary biology, as book titles within those fields suggest long-term processes are compressed and accelerated (see, e.g., Cochran & Harpending 2009; Hawking 1988). Scientific assessments of the past depend on aesthetics. By arguing this, I should note, my aim has not been to deny the reality of deep time, but simply to highlight how deep time mingles with the present, which has the power of making knowledge in the earth sciences more real. Acknowledging the mingling of past and present in climate history brings earth science closer to a sensory encounter with the earth, contradicting the principle of epistemic distance on which Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 20 Cristi án Simonetti modern science rests. It is in the attempt to grasp the incommensurably long and slow through the short and fast that the vastness of time emerges in climate science. Transcendence in climate science requires simultaneously achieving immanence. The same might be true, although presumably in the completely opposite direction, of sciences dealing with the immensely small, including, for example, particle physics (see Traweek 1988). In this case, the vastness of time probably emerges in the attempt to render the miniscule commensurate with what is comparatively larger, which, once again, depends on sensorially grasping the duration of processes that occur throughout the lifetime of scientists. Scientific access to processes that are ‘beyond’ immediate experience, such as climate change or any other for that matter, depends on the senses. Science has never stopped being indigenous. NOTES I thank the geoscientists with whom I have worked for their kind support. I am also grateful to the University of Aberdeen’s North theme for funding the research on which this article is based. Earlier versions of this article were presented at a panel at the Association of Social Anthropologists’ Decennial Conference, held at the University of Edinburgh in 2014, entitled ‘Made to Measure: Anthropology and Enlightenment’; at the Centro Interdisciplinario de Respuesta al Cambio y Variabilidad Climática, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, in 2014; at the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social, Universidade de Brası́lia, Brazil, in 2014; at the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, 2014; and at a panel at the conference ‘Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change’, organized by the Royal Anthropological Institute and held at the British Museum in 2016, entitled ‘Weathering Time’. I am grateful to Alice Street, Jamie Cross, Carlos Sautchuk, Javier Taks, Andrés Zarankin, and Heid Jerstad for respectively organizing these events, as well as to those who attended them and gave me feedback. I also want to thank Cristóbal Bonelli, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Diana Espirito Santo, Marcelo González Gálvez, Rachel Harkness, Elizabeth Hodson, Franz Krause, Peter Loovers, and Bronislaw Szerszynski for their generous comments on earlier versions of the article. I also thank Matei Candea and Elizabeth Hallam, former and current JRAI Editors, respectively, as well as the anonymous JRAI reviewers, for their critical comments and useful suggestions on how to improve the article. Finally my thanks go to Justin Dyer for his careful copy-editing. 1 http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/ccl/faqs.html (accessed 11 February 2019). 2 Arguably, Twain’s distinction does not fully correspond to that of the WMO in that its emphasis is on the contrast between future orientation and present experience, not differences in scale. However, the expression has been adopted by climate researchers to discuss the distinction between climate and weather (e.g. Lovejoy & Schertzer 2013). Hulme’s distinction between climate and weather, in contrast to the WMO’s, resembles Twain’s in that for him ‘the weather humans experience often fails to meet their expectations’ (2017: 4). 3 http://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/press_information.shtml (accessed January 2016, no longer available on-line). 4 See https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ipcc-30th-anniversary/ (accessed 11 February 2019, emphasis added). 5 The word ‘indigenous’ is very loaded and has multiple connotations depending on the ethnographic context, although it is often used in negotiations over land rights (Cruikshank 2007). I use it here to discuss the environmental knowledge that oral traditions have accumulated over generations, bearing in mind recent discussions in anthropology that use the term to describe forms of knowing that are ontologically different from Western naturalism (see, e.g., Descola 2009; Latour 2009; Viveiros de Castro 1998; also Candea 2012). 6 Deep time is a concept normally referring to processes that unfold at a geological scale. Although originating in the geosciences, the concept has been adopted by a number of disciplines across the sciences and the humanities, including anthropology. For an account of historical and contemporary uses of the concept across disciplines that study the past, see Simonetti (2018). 7 A similar theme has been exploited by the Long Now Foundation, an environmental organization trying to raise awareness of deep time by making it visible in the present. The foundation has built an analogue clock capable of visually counting up to 10,000 years. 8 For scholars in the humanities, although the concept promises to blur the line between human history and earth’s history (Chakrabarty 2009; Latour 2014), the Anthropocene results from a Western triumphalist narrative, incapable of distributing environmental responsibility (Crist 2013; Haraway 2015; Malm & Hornborg 2014). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C Weathering climate 21 9 A sense of differential speed in early cinema, according to Kern (1983), resulted from the operator’s capacity to manipulate the pace of the film so as to surprise an audience. It is worth noting, bearing in mind the argument developed in the coming sections, how the cinema, par excellence, contributed technologically to afford an optical view of the world in time. 10 Although objectivity and quantification converge in climate modelling, through inferential statistics, they have also diverged in the history of science (see Daston & Galison 2010). 11 According to Snobelen (2012), this idea is wrongly attributed to Newton by some of his contemporaries, including Leibniz, a misconception which later spread partially through the influence of Pierre-Simon de Laplace. 12 Lapland and Alaska are very different environments, respectively dominated by forests and glaciers. Nevertheless, the argument developed here applies to both. There is no reason to believe that communities living in those regions do not have access to the effects of long-term environmental change recorded in the landscape. REFERENCES Barnes, J. & M.R. Dove 2015. 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Climat changeant et télescopages du temps Résumé Comme le suggère la distinction scientifique entre climat et météo, la connaissance du climat est censée échapper à l’expérience quotidienne de l’environnement par les peuples autochtones en cela qu’elle nécessite Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 ! C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 24 Cristi án Simonetti un enregistrement sur le long terme. Une enquête ethnographique auprès des chercheurs en géosciences en Ecosse et dans l’ouest du Groenland montre que ces scientifiques ont maı̂trisé l’art de rendre « visible » ce qui est « invisible » aux sens en jouant sur des échelles de temps plus courtes. En pensant et communiquant à propos du passé, ils compressent et accélèrent les processus environnementaux sur le long terme, souvent au prix de leur dissociation d’avec les processus à plus court terme, notamment l’adaptation des organismes vivants. Cette compétence, dont l’auteur examine les circonstances historiques de son apparition, est liée à un idéal d’objectivité de la science qui correspond à une compréhension optique du temps, inspirée par l’image du télescope. Remettant en question la distinction entre climat et météo et la distance épistémique qui la fonde, il critique des approches récentes en anthropologie environnementale qui l’ont déployée sans distance critique pour établir une distinction entre connaissances indigènes de l’environnement de la science du climat. Ses recherches parmi les peuples autochtones de l’Arctique le mènent à proposer, en conclusion, d’autres façons de comprendre les connaissances sur le changement climatique, au-delà de la distinction entre climat et temps qu’il fait. Cristián Simonetti is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Programme, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Sentient conceptualisations: feeling for time in the sciences of the past (Routledge, 2018). Programa de Antropologı́a, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago, 7820436, Chile. csimonetti@uc.cl Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-24 Royal Anthropological Institute 2019 ! C