Climate change and memory

Mike Hulme

pp. 159-162

in: Sebastian Groes (ed), Memory in the twenty-first century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

"We are familiar with statements by elderly people, such as "The winters were colder and the snows deeper when I was a youngster". So reported American meteorologist J.B. Kincer in one of the earliest scientific papers to draw attention to the worldwide climate warming underway in the 1920s and 1930s.¹ Kincer's report highlights the "when I was younger" claim typical of the more elderly cohorts of nearly all societies in conversation with younger generations. In this conversation, the conclusive clause — almost universally, and certainly with recourse to a comparative or even superlative adjective — goes: "the summers were sunnier", "the winters were colder", "the ice was thicker", "the rains more reliable", "the seasons more predictable".