Contemporary debates over the threat of future climate change, coupled with the fixation on the apparent acceleration in anthropogenic global warming, and the general dominance of climatic modelling in climate change studies, have obscured the distinctive meaning that climate holds, and has held in the past, for different people in different places. Although there is a consensus that the global climate is changing, that human activities are exacerbating natural climatic variability, and that climate change will pose new and significant challenges for global society at large, the precise impacts for different social, economic and ecological systems are less clearly understood. It is essential to try to obtain a better understanding of how different groups of people in different contextual settings and at different points in time have conceptualised climate and have responded to its fluctuations. \n\nThere have, therefore, been calls for a re-examination of climate change that i.) challenges the increasingly global and scientific perspective on climate and ii.) addresses the idea of climate and its culturally and spatially variable dimensions. Recent climate scholarship has, for example, highlighted a need to understand how different groups of people in different spatial and temporal contexts conceptualise climate as an idea. Efforts are thus now being made to explore how 'ordinary people' understand, talk or write about climate and make sense of it and to investigate climate as a function of personal memory, experience and intergenerational transfer of 'climate knowledge', all of which demands a more intimate spatial resolution than global perspectives afford. \n\nThe purpose of the proposed network is to draw together academic researchers from within and beyond the arts and humanities, representatives from professional and learned societies including the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) and the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) and various popular climate and weather related interest groups, including the Climatological Observers Link (COL), The Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO) and the Cloud Appreciation Society (CAS), to investigate possible approaches to encourage a more culturally driven and local-scale consideration of climate as an idea from both an historical and contemporary perspective. \n\nThree workshops are proposed involving all these stakeholder groups. These will address a series of distinctive themes: i.) the potential contribution that arts and humanities approaches can make to contemporary climate and climate change discourses; ii.) the value of adopting an historical perspective in the investigation of the interrelationships between people, place and climate and of bringing historical materials into wider public and professional circulation to illustrate their use in developing narratives of climates past and present and iii.) the way in which the ordinary citizen, and amateur groups in particular, have in the past and could in the future usefully contribute to the production and circulation of climate knowledge, and to establish how they might become more involved as intermediaries between the public, academic and professional domains. \n\n\n\n

Palaeoclimatic data provide the quantitative information and context required for the study and attribution of natural- and anthropogenic-forced climatic variability. If our society is to appropriately address the future challenges of climate change, it is of vital importance that we know how the climate of the United Kingdom (UK) has varied in the past. Only with this information will it be possible to formulate effective policy and critically evaluate the performance of the Earth system models that increasingly underpin UK climate policy. Currently proxy-specific limitations severely constrain the number of reliable temperature or precipitation reconstructions for these islands. This is especially true of numerically verifiable reconstructions of late Holocene (<2kya) climate. Remarkably, despite a long established tradition of palaeoclimatology, we have not established, with any confidence, the frequency of seasonal extremes, or indeed the levels of temperature and precipitation of the Roman, Mediaeval, or "Little Ice Age" periods; and importantly, we cannot therefore make comparisons with recent climate. As a consequence, policy makers, researchers and the public are forced to rely upon lower-confidence reconstructions or outdated, uncalibrated low-frequency records based upon anecdotal evidence. This is wholly inappropriate for both modern numerical analyses and robust evidence-based decision making. Our new, but rigorously tested method, is based upon the stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis of precisely-dated oak tree-rings. These data are capable of capturing past climatic variability (both temperature and precipitation) with a high degree of numerical accuracy. We can therefore address this research gap for the UK and other under-represented, temperate mid-latitude regions. This project will develop 2000 year numerically verifiable reconstructions of summer temperature and precipitation, with defined confidence intervals. Such data are urgently required by the research community and will be incorporated into national and continental-scale palaeoclimate composites, enhancing their regional relevance and reconstructive skill. We will deliver a quantitative reference climatology that will mark a step-change in UK palaeoclimatology, moving from reliance upon seminal, but outdated research (e.g. Lamb 1966), to a new numerical and tightly constrained understanding of past climate.

Political and media focus on the possible implications of climate change, the predominantly scientific discourse in which this is couched, and the increasingly global scale of climate thinking, have obscured the culturally specific and spatially and temporally distinctive meanings of climate. There is thus a need to reconnect cultural values to debates about climate change. The way in which people recall and remember particular types of weather, and their nostalgia about past climate and weather events, remain to be explored in any detail. A focus on these processes could help us gain a clearer insight into the fashioning of popular understanding about climate and climate change as part of lived experience. In recent years, there has been an increase in the use of sound and voice to interpret and explore how the public makes sense of the historical, cultural and physical landscape. Yet the role of talking, walking and listening in helping to improve public understanding and appreciation of past climate and weather, not to mention possible climate futures, remains to be explored. In responding to this challenge, this project focuses on two experimental strategies, both geared towards public engagement with historical geographies of climate and the weather. It involves project partners the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) and the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS). We will investigate popular memories of weather and climate change over time through personal, popular recollections, via a series of audio and video recordings planned to take place at WAMFest in June 2012. The purpose will be to offer provision for the public, through audio and visual media, to record personal memories about the weather, particular weather events and their own perspectives on climate change experienced during their lifetimes. From this we will be able to identify how people remember the weather and how memory and experience of weather events and perceptions of climate change influence personal attitudes, behaviours and understanding of climate change debates. These materials will be edited and presented in a published volume and via the RMetS website and so made available to a very wide range of publics, school children, students, teachers, researchers and professionals with an interest in meteorology. We also seek to develop an integrated audio/ mixed media weather walk. The proposed walk focuses on the work of British climatologist and pioneer of cultural climatology, Professor Gordon Manley who is associated with the collection and analysis of long-term, amateur, instrumental weather records for the UK, and his interest in people’s understandings of the weather, and their personal appreciation and social memory of the weather. His work has particular currency at a time when the ‘relational context’ of climate is being identified as critical for understanding how different groups of people in different places comprehend climate change. The weather walk, which will be focused on Dun Fell in the Pennines where Manley ran a weather station, will include excerpts from his writings on these themes and opportunities to download texts and images taken from his various popular publications on climate published between the 1950s and his death in 1980. It is anticipated that the weather walk will feature as part of the RGS-IBG initiative, Discovering Britain, which represents a hub for a range of authoritative high quality story-led audio walks across the whole of Britain, specifically geared to engage a cross section of the general public. Drawing upon technical expertise at Nottingham, we also seek to explore the development of a locative media prototype, which will be designed to run on android-based 'smart phones. We propose to test how, through mobile technologies, the diverse contributions of participants on the walk might enrich an individual user's sense of place as he or she moves through it.

How might our engagement with climate change differ if we could walk around its data, touch it, carry it with us and experience it unhindered by digital screens, tablets and interfaces? We know about our changing environment through the data that scientists collect. This material is highly significant as it shows how our climate is changing, but tends to be communicated to the public in technical visualisations and numeric diagrams that are highly abstract in form and difficult to understand for non-specialists. Studies have shown that people respond poorly to these information-heavy approaches, and in recent public polls climate change was mentioned by only 20% of respondents as an issue of concern. This has important implications for us all because understanding of climate change is vital to generating both required policy initiatives and personal changes in society at large. Our research proposes that just as we experience our climate physically through immersion in landscapes and weather, our engagement with climate change might change if we similarly encountered its information and data in physical forms. As such, our project seeks to develop entirely new ways to represent climate change by taking its data (geological, atmospheric, biological) off digital screens and translate it into physical objects, artworks and environments. Research in computer science has shown that when we look at physical 3D prints of data, our ability to understand and engage with it increases. This is because when we touch or walk around real objects of dimension and scale, we involve more of our human senses. Physical representations of data not only enable better understanding of information, but also generate new kinds of insights and experiences. We pursue our research through a unique combination of practice-based art and design enquiry in conjunction with science, public workshops and theoretical studies. Our team brings together experienced researchers from Central St. Martins, University of the Arts, the British Antarctic Survey, design studio Proboscis, and computer scientists from Birkbeck, University of London. Using 3D printers, we translate climate data into physical structures, objects and environments, which involves writing software for data analysis, designing objects in 3D programmes, and experimenting with a range of sustainable materials (wood, resin, ceramics). Research develops in three phases exploring differences in scale, material and concept: 1) Small hand-held objects will examine how climate data can be made tactile, intimate and mobile 2) Larger component-based sculptures mirror the way that the Earth's climate is composed of interacting elements 3) Larger environmental installations develop ideas around inhabitation and shared responsibility for our climate We aim to produce new public understandings of climate change by: - Developing new representations and public experiences of our changing environment - Producing new models of enquiry between art and science to communicate shared issues of concern - Developing new physical approaches/techniques for the use of significant climate data We will produce a substantial range of outputs including artworks, software, industry guides and publications. We expect this research to be of interest to the general public, policy groups, the creative industries and digital entrepreneurs pursuing novel applications of data. Key to our approach is that we directly engage the public in ways that enable them to feedback and input into research as it evolves. This activity takes the form of free 'maker' workshops, a festival of art and science and numerous exhibitions across the UK at significant public venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (Liverpool) and the Royal Meteorological Society (Reading).