During the 1990s, the reindeer herders of northern Fennoscandia experienced several winters which, from their perspective, were not only peculiar but which posed serious challenges to their livelihoods. The weather was uncharacteristic of what they usually expected during winter. Snow fell too early; in mid-winter rain alternated with warm periods, followed by a crusting of snow and a toxic mold formation in lichen pastures. But other times of the year seemed strangely out of sorts too: there were blizzards during the reindeer calving season in May and even in June.
    
Rather than being unusual weather conditions – aberrations in an otherwise predictable annual seasonal cycle – they appear now to be confirming a trend. Since the 1990s, the news about such strange turns in the weather has become more common, not only in northern Finland, Sweden and Norway, but elsewhere in the circumpolar Arctic as indigenous and local people report their observations and experiences of the regional manifestations of global change.  

In the course of our work in anthropology we research and engage with local communities and also in projects with climate scientists in multidisciplinary teams. As we listen to people living in northern communities, as we sit with them in their homes or travel with them through the forests or on the sea ice, one thing that often strikes us is how they rarely mention the climate. Instead, they talk about the weather. It is a striking illustration of the differences between local and global discourses about climate change. People’s experiences are related to their interaction with their immediate and meaningful environment in practice, while climate change science is about abstraction, generalization and measurement. In this article we shed a little light on the challenges this cultural starting point creates for applied research on climate change.

The anthropology of climate change
As anthropologists, we have worked in several places across the North with diverse ecosystems, ranging from Saami and Finnish reindeer herding cooperatives in boreal forest landscapes to Inuit coastal communities dependent on Arctic sea ice. Yet we hear unnervingly similar accounts from people as they witness and experience a rapidly changing world. As we listen to people speak, we hear stories of travelling on the land and witnessing the effects of a changing climate.

In Canada’s Baffin Island, elders talk of increasing temperatures, compared with previous years, even decades. Hunters say they have been seeing earlier spring melts and later freeze-ups in autumn, with periods of longer summer-like conditions in between. The weather has become variable and unpredictable, they all say. And just as reindeer herders in Finland have experienced with their domesticated counterparts, the change and variability in climate in Alaska and Canada has had many significant impacts on migratory caribou. The migration routes and the location of calving grounds have shifted and food sources have sometimes become inaccessible. We have heard people remark that animals such as reindeer, caribou and seals even taste different. In Nunavut, elders have recounted how the animals are skinnier, and how caribou fur is not of the same quality anymore, making it difficult to make warm clothing. Fishermen have even reported that some fish have changed colour.

The experiences and observations of Saami and Inuit confirm scientific research which reports on the changes in tundra and boreal ecosystems in northernmost Europe, the unprecedented melting of glaciers in the mountains of Canada and Greenland, and the increasingly unreliable sea ice conditions for Inuit seal hunters and Greenlandic fishers. Southern animal species are moving ever northwards and the indigenous peoples of the Arctic say that their languages, which have evolved in close interaction with local environments, don’t even have words for some of the birds and insects they are now seeing.

Some of these species are invasive and cause considerable damage to northern ecosystems and economies. For example, the deer fly (Lipoptena cervi) began to spread to Finland from areas southeast of the country in the1960s. The deer fly is a parasite that feeds on the blood of elk, but reindeer are also susceptible to it and the insect spends several months in a reindeer’s fur, even surviving through the long, cold winters. During the past decade it has become a major challenge for reindeer husbandry and Saami and Finnish herders are concerned with the threat of what appears to be the deer fly’s inexorable spread through the northernmost reindeer herding areas of Fennoscandia.

While public perceptions of Arctic climate change are perhaps informed mainly by images of solitary, starving polar bears drifting on melting ice floes, indigenous and local peoples of the North remind us that climate change is a human issue. Indeed, for indigenous peoples such as the Saami of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland and Inuit in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Chukotka, it is one of the most pressing contemporary issues of everyday concern. The effects of climate change are everywhere present – for example, in the thawing of permafrost and the irritation caused to reindeer (to say nothing of the damage to the value of furs) by deer flies. The image of a starving polar bear may stir emotional global public responses, yet the presence of a tiny insect and the effects of other invasive species can provoke local concern and raise local anxieties in as much the same way that the potential disappearance of charismatic megafauna does.  

Differences in knowing and perceiving the world
Recent scientific research and assessments of climate change – the Arctic Council’s Arctic Climate Impact Assessment being a notable example – have attempted to bridge epistemological divides between different scientific disciplines as well as between science and indigenous and local knowledge. In this way, local knowledge of changing animal migration routes, or of the northwards advance of insects such as the deer fly, provides powerful evidence that often corroborates scientific data on climate change. In some cases, indigenous peoples and other northern residents are the first to bring observed environmental changes – such as the thinning of sea ice and the appearance of new species – to the attention of science.

Yet despite the seemingly neat blurring of scientific and indigenous/local knowledge, a meeting of different ways of perceiving the world, we are still confronted with a problem of scales. As a discipline, social or cultural anthropology often plays a crucial role in reporting people’s everyday environmental problems and the challenges they face in trying to respond and adapt. Often, these problems come with many practical, ethical and epistemological dimensions. And so it is with climate change. So far, the debate over climate change and its impacts has been dominated by scientists, politicians, environmentalists and conservationists. Little attention has been given to how people experience climate change in everyday contexts and what climate change means to them and their livelihoods. We are, according to climate change science, facing a number of “tipping points” beyond which irreversible changes are about to happen. As the polar ice caps melt and permafrost thaws, as South Pacific islands disappear under the rising tides and as coastal erosion slices off the edges of many storm-battered countries, and as deserts spread and as hurricanes intensify, the world is about to look strikingly different. Preparing to understand and position human experiences and possible responses to climate change becomes a primary challenge.

Local versus scientific understanding
As noted by several anthropologists writing about climate, the human dimension of climate in practice is the weather, and people’s experiences and observations of the weather are bound up with their daily engagement with it. The weather is something one feels on one's face in the form of rain, snow, wind and sun, or underfoot as one walks on the different textures of sea ice and snow-covered ground; climate, in the way it is described and understood by science, including the simulation of future states of the global climate system by general circulation models, seems too remote and abstract, something removed from local experience. In Greenland, the word sila means ‘weather’ but it also means ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’. Sila is an external force that manifests itself in people as intelligence and sense (silaqarneq). Sila connects a person to the rhythms of the universe and integrates the self with the wider environment. A person who lacks sila is said to lack the essential relationship with the environment necessary for human well-being. Lack of sila can result in temporary disorientation – the word silaqaraluarneq refers to the state of being out of one’s mind, but it can also mean “the weather is out of its mind” and is used in discussing changes in weather and climate that are unusual or difficult to account for. This example highlights Inuit notions about the close relationship between personhood and the environment, but it speaks to a more general comment on the bodily and environmentally-sound basis for human well-being.

In stark contrast, the theoretics, predictions, models and scenarios of climate change science, while sophisticated, are global in scale and the time spans they deal with vary from several decades to centuries. Yet it is these kinds of scientific framings of global climate change which dominate policy discourse. International climate change policy-making processes require a solid scientific basis and, in claiming to provide this, science asserts social and political authority. Climate models are impressive – despite their inherent limitations and uncertainties – but they produce simulations which are not good at capturing human experience or the complexity of social life. What is quantitatively and statistically meaningful may be meaningless for the very people who are actually worrying about how they are going to have to adapt to profound changes.

One difference of local accounts compared to scientific reductions is that weather-related reasoning is not a separate effort compared to, for example, some other environmental circumstances that effect cultural decision-making. The adaptation of traditional livelihoods to new weather conditions is intermingled with attempts at solving a great deal of other economic, societal, legislative and cultural problems, of which many are set by outsiders. They may be entanglements of bureaucratic requirements, or are defined, implemented, administered and managed in terms of completely different environmental preferences. In theory, for example, it could be adaptive to respond to climate change by changing the timing or areas of hunting, fishing or reindeer herding, but in practice the options to do so are limited by sectored conservation, land use or administrative regulations, or established industrial resource utilization, such as forestry or mining activities. Discussion of adaptation to climate change requires us to ponder the complexities of causal networks instead of a sectored analysis of isolated causalities.

As an empirical example of how these climate related adaptations are played out in practice, let us return and take a closer look at the peculiar weather conditions in the reindeer herding areas of Finland, Sweden and Norway during the 1990s. These were scientifically explained to be caused by the North Atlantic Oscillation (repetitive climatic, especially precipitation cycles) phenomenon, which in turn, was explained to have been altered by climate change – particularly by the increasing sea temperatures in the North Atlantic. Naturally, this science-based explanation did not belong to the understanding and experiences of reindeer herders as such, nor did the existence of scientific explanation ease the local suffering or looking for appropriate adaptation measures. More so, local understanding was derived from herders’ daily interactions with reindeer, snow, rain, cold, frost, crusts of snow, and finally of their search for supplementary fodder for their suffering reindeer, to say nothing of the economic strategies needed to secure money to buy this extra fodder. Talks about global climatic phenomena had reached the local level at some point but were received mainly as narratives produced by outsiders which were reproduced by the media. As such, it was felt that there was a disconnect between these narratives and local perceptions and explanatory accounts. At the most, these global narratives served as a general comparative framework for local experiences, which were considered superior in their explanatory power of local events and, particularly, as the most appropriate information in practice in planning local adaptive action.


The challenge of communicating climate change
In general, many scientists admit that it is too late to avoid the kind of unprecedented climate change depicted in assessments and scenarios. Instead, they argue, the emphasis of policy-makers should be placed on mitigating forthcoming changes and enhancing adaptation capabilities on different levels, including local and regional, in addition to large-scale intergovernmental efforts, such as national emission quotas. In theory, humans are assumed to be responsible for climate change, but nations set only very broad frames of reference for regional, local and sectored adaptation efforts. Human perspectives, interests and understandings need to be given more weight in the future. Humans in general may have caused climate change but it is individuals who should be motivated to make a change. The first task is to listen to people and respect their experiences and argue for the translation and communication local perceptions of climate change in international policy-making processes and perhaps, for example, Art could offer us new means to navigate between understandings. In any case, every so often, instead of merely following the conventional scientific approach and reproducing global discourses about climate, it might prove worthwhile just to talk about the weather.