Weathertalk: How we relate to our climates

Last year us Brits contended with the Beast from the East, an unusually freezing coldwave stemming from Easterly winds, and the joint hottest summer on record. We’re well accustomed to the high variability of British weather, but last year was something else entirely. Up and down the country, people complained and conversed on that most British of all topics. In fact, a study conducted in 2008 found that a good natter about the forecast was the most unique British trait. Our obsession with the weather comes through in our lexicon too, just consider how many words we have for rain – drizzle, shower, downpour, spitting, teeming, sunshower.

We all know someone with a go-to phrase for weathertalk. As soon as it starts raining, my parents will all of a sudden pipe up to say “it’s been trying to rain all day”. And we’ve all had a conversation struck up by a stranger over the conditions outside, “it’s a nippy out there isn’t it?” is a common phrase heard around my town. The unpredictability of British weather gives rise to social interactions that stress a common understanding and response to sudden changes in our daily environments. Weathertalk offers the possibility of reflecting on the situated-ness of how we live; how the way we move through the world is contingent upon the conditions it offers. Among the myriad of ways we describe the cold, perhaps the most telling is when it is “cold to the bone”. It’s a phrase that emphasises all our bodily and material entanglements between the self and the not-the-self.

“Weathertalk offers the possibility of reflecting on the situated-ness of how we live; how the way we move through the world is contingent upon the conditions it offers.”

Being an island nation, our weather stems from air masses from both tropical and polar, maritime and continental, air masses, culminating in a temperate climate with unpredictable peaks in cold and warm weather. While we do have stable seasons, the difference in weather from one day to the next, or even in the same day, can be as stark as the hottest day in summer to the frostiest day in winter. It’s important here to point out the distinction between weather and climate. Weather is made up of the immediate relationship between temperature, cloud formation, wind formation, and so on. Whereas climate is a term we use to describe general patterns of weather over a longer period of time.

As Mike Hulme reminds us in his book Weathered, climate as a concept is a psychologically invaluable one as it helps give order and meaning to weather patterns that appear chaotic. But what happens to the stability of this concept in the age of climate change? We know from the young field of attribution climate studies that as climate change worsens extreme weather events are more likely. So, then, the comfortable concepts of climate that we’re used to may begin to change. What is a ‘temperate’ or ‘mild’ climate in a country with frequent life-threatening flooding?  This may seem extreme, but this is an all too possible scenario in the not too distant future.

How then can we develop new modes of weathertalk to account for climate change? Can we come up with new words to describe anthropogenic weather changes in colloquial terms? Perhaps instead of raining ‘cats and dogs’ it’s raining ‘capitalists and colonialists’? Hmm, doesn’t have quite the same ring. The elegance and pitfall of weathertalk is that it is immediate. There’s no way to discuss briefly the history of the Anthropocene or carbon emission cycles. Other than to say “well, it’s all the climate change isn’t it?” Perhaps that will be enough. Perhaps not. We have no way to know. But we do know that how we relate to our climate through weather is changing, gradually now but it will speed up soon. If the Beast from the East or the Heatwave of 2018 taught us anything, it’s that we love to talk about the weather. But the ways we do so in social and political terms will have to change.  

Another aspect of cultural-weather relations is how we tend to personalise and psychologise weather. In literature, weather is typically either used as a metaphorical tool, as in the case of the pathetic fallacy, or as a plot point. In the case of metaphor, weather is typically a psychic mirror reflecting the state of characters. We need only consult a copy of Wuthering Heights to see an illustration of this fact. As a plot point, we cannot find a more famous example than Dorothy being whisked away to Oz on the tail of a tornado.

There is some truth to daily life in these literacy tactics. The stories and plans of our lives can shift greatly depending on the weather. The cancelled flight to a dream holiday. The day you discover a new favourite book because you were snowed in and had nothing else to do. And in terms of psychology, there may be some truth to the idea that the weather can affect our psychic lives, as any sufferer of seasonal affective disorder can tell you.

Rather than the simply the banal consequences of the interactions between air and water, weather is deeply personal and astutely social in the web of connections that make up community life. In our changing climatological world, the way we do weathertalk will come under pressure. It’s not simply bucketing it outside anymore, there’s extreme rainfall because of the interaction of natural and human actors played out on atmospheric stages over millennia.

“Rather than the simply the banal consequences of the interactions between air and water, weather is deeply personal and astutely social in the web of connections that make up community life.”

We may or may not be able to discuss the complex interactions between climate change, the weather, and the very concept of climate in simple colloquial terms. Unfortunately, we will find whether we can very soon.