Surfacing the ethereal: a phenomenology of climate and its changes

Surfacing the ethereal: a phenomenology of climate and its changes

Dr Maximilian Gregor Hepach, Institute for Arts and Media, University of Potsdam, Germany

Abstract:

To be living in a period of changing climate(s) means to navigate an epistemically and ontologically confusing space. On the one hand, anthropogenic global warming is an object of scientific knowledge, arrived at with the help of measurement, abstraction, and modelling on a global scale. These practices displace climate and its changes away from the realm of experience. The (un-)usual weather of any given day can serve neither as evidence for nor against global warming. On the other hand, as climates change, weather must as well. The recent conspicuous increase of extreme weather events – droughts, heat waves, and wildfires in particular – in Europe and North America have, for instance, been reported to be global warming ‘hanging visibly in the air’. Drawing on phenomenological theory, I spell out and clarify what it might mean to experience a changing climate.

My starting-point is the phenomenology already implicit in the (history of) modern climatology. I go on to pay special attention to the more ethereal aspects of climate (change) which phenomenology helps surface, namely what is lost from climate change and global warming’s psychophysiological dimensions, taking up work in geography on affective atmospheres and elemental media. I conclude by outlining future research into the phenomenology of meteoropathy and “meteorosensitivity”, as phenomena where changes in the atmosphere inscribe and impress themselves into oneself.

The event will be online.

ZOOM LINK

https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/j/96510703059?pwd=enNVMG5zQi9NN0loMCtwYnZNVkNaZz09

Meeting ID: 965 1070 3059, Passcode: 530042