CLIMATIC FLUCTUATION

Since around the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been a call for climatology to broaden its scope to include an explicit cultural perspective in the investigation of the complex interactions between the climate system and the social/ cultural system. This contrasts with traditional meteorological climatology that views climatology simply as a physical or natural environmental science. Although there have always been important parts of applied climatology, such as agroclimatology and the study of climatic hazards, that have considered environment-human interactions of various types, this has been firmly within a scientific methodology. Recent disagreements about human impacts on environment in general and global warming in particular have highlighted the need to take account of the opinions, feelings, choices and behaviours of people in the scientific process itself as well as in matters of environmentalmanagement and environmental policy. The rise of cultural climatology may be likened to the rise of postmodernism in the social sciences and the cultural turn in human geography.

[See alsoenvironmental challenges, human dimensions of environmental change, social construction]