Climate Change Knowledge and Political Identity in Australia

National data from the 2018 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes show that knowledge of climate change is positively associated with the scientific consensus position on anthropogenic climate change. Responses to factual quiz questions that include climate trigger terms such as “greenhouse gas” or reference to increased ocean temperature and acidification are influenced by one’s political party identification, with Liberal and National party identifiers tending to score lower than Labor partisans on climate knowledge scales. Yet, responses to climate-related factual questions sans trigger terms are not influenced by political partisanship. Climate skeptics tend to score lower on climate knowledge scales than those who accept anthropogenic climate change, although skeptics also tend to have inflated confidence in their factual knowledge of climate change.

Travels and Trials of Climate Knowledge in Finnish Municipalities

We examine why implementing climate aims has proven challenging for municipalities. Recognising that climate policy research identifies ‘barriers’ to the forward motion of environmental knowledge, we use STS tools to dismantle ‘barrier thinking’ and analyse the dynamics of climate knowledge in municipal organisations. The primary data are 21 interviews with climate change and risk management experts in Finnish municipalities. We employ the idea of ‘trials of strength’ to analyse not mere barriers but gatherings, translations, and implementations of environmental knowledge. We argue that four kinds of trials are crucial in transforming climate knowledge so it can cohere with ongoing processes: it is gathered and condensed at the organisation’s borders; climate experts embody and transmit the knowledge; meeting tables form obligatory passage points for its implementation; and road maps draw actors together to circulate it. While traveling around municipal organisations, climate knowledge is often sidetracked but can sometimes become unexpectedly effective.

Climate Grant Universities Could Mobilize Community Climate Action

With cues from the successful land grant model, the United States should establish a system of universities to democratize access to climate knowledge and aid efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

The Climates of the Victorian Novel: Seasonality, Weather, and Regional Fiction in Britain and Australia

Anthropocene criticism of Victorian literature has focused more on questions of temporality and predictability than on those related to climate in the nineteenth century. Climate knowledge is central to the regional novel, which is attuned to the seasonal basis of agriculture and sociality, but the formal influence of the British climate also becomes more apparent through a consideration of the genre's adaptation to colonial conditions. Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge highlights how a known seasonal cycle underpins the differentiation of climate and weather and explores the role of economic systems in mediating the experience of climate. Rolf Boldrewood's The Squatter's Dream, set amid the nonannual seasonal change of Australia, demonstrates the fracturing of the regional novel form under the stress of sustained drought. Such a comparative approach highlights the importance of regular seasonality as the basis of the Victorian novel's ability to conceptualize the relation of climate, weather, and capital.

Atmospheric Archives: Gender and Climate Knowledge in Colonial Tasmania

There is a rich cache of letters detailing the production of climate knowledge at Tasmania's Hobart Observatory in the early nineteenth century. By contrast, a mere handful of sentences survive in the written record to describe the production of climate knowledge outside the Hobart Observatory, in Tasmania's north-east. In this paper, I confront the question of what to do with these unbalanced archival remains. I draw on the work of social and cultural historians as well as historians of colonialism and science to advocate a three-pronged methodology for approaching the problem of the unbalanced atmospheric archives. The application of this methodology, I show, reveals the way gender relations shaped the way atmospheric knowledge was both produced and used by historical actors in colonial Tasmania.