A History of Storms: New Approaches to Climate Fiction and Climate Literacy

Over the past thirty years scientists and writers have presented ever more detailed, accurate and impactful narratives of our changing climate. This work has helped to ensure that causes and effects of climate change are now widely communicated and are largely understood by governments, organizations and individuals around the world. However, as the stalled negotiations of recent COP climate summits have proven, simply understanding (even deeply feeling) the causes and effects of climate change is not enough to ensure the international agreements and transformative social action that is desperately needed.

This is a problem of narrative and, as philosophers such as Timothy Clark have discussed, a problem of scale (2016). What is needed are new narrative forms that can work across the vastly different spatial and temporal scales of climate change and human experience. As Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it: 'We need to connect deep and recorded histories' and put the 'planetary' timescales of climate science 'in conversation' with the timescales of human history and experience (2021).

This project will instigate just such a conversation through a new form of 'historical climate fiction' developed in partnership with the Met Office.

This partnership will allow for a creative engagement with both cutting-edge climate science and little-known documents from the Met Office archives that chart the history and development of this science. The history of meteorology and climatology is the history of infrastructure, technology, capitalism, conflict and empire. It is also a history of people.

The Met Office archives tell the stories of missionaries meticulously recording rainfall, of telegraph operators conveying the first storm forecasts and of merchant sailors mapping ocean currents by depositing 'Bottle Papers' along trade routes around the world. To date, such sources have been used primarily as data sets for climate models. This project seeks to recover the localised human histories of these sources and bring them into creative dialogue with the planetary perspectives of modern climate science, providing the foundation for a fictional method that will operate across vastly different spatial and temporal scales.

This historical dialogue is long overdue. As climate justice campaigners and authors from the global south have asserted, a major barrier to unilateral action is the fact that the scientific narrative presented in the IPCC Report makes almost no mention of history (Ghosh, 2021). Or rather, the historical perspective it offers is one in which 'humanity' is figured as a uniform totality rather than, in Donna Haraway's words, 'situated human beings in complicated histories' (2016).

This project will take as its starting point the 'situated' and 'complicated' human histories that emerge from the Met Office archives. It will ask what these histories can tell us about the discourses, structures and foundational narratives that underpin modern science, and how they must be adapted to engage with our changing world.

Central to this fellowship will be a sustained process of interdisciplinary collaboration, through a programme of creative workshops at the Met Office. These workshops will engage scientists with the ongoing research and practice of this fellowship and will be used to develop and test ideas which will inform both the creative outputs and the Met Office's new 'climate literacy' strategy.

In this way, the fellowship will not only generate new fictional narratives to engage the wider public, it will also show the potential for creative practice-as-research to help shape policy and practice at a major scientific institution, providing an exciting and innovative model for future interdisciplinary work that puts Arts and Humanities research at the centre of the strategic response to climate change.