My second paper on the link between extreme weather and climate change is out at @RGS_IBG. This one is more theoretical - how does extreme event attribution affect our understanding of nature and culture in the Anthropocene? https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/tran.12390

Climate has always been intimately linked with weather. There can be no concept of climate without weather, as global climate itself is statistical, an aggregate of meteorological measurements (local, instantaneous weather) across time and space.

But it's only recently that climate change has been seen as an agent that can make certain weather events (like the California drought) more likely or more severe.

I argue that this is part of a much wider phenomenon: Climate change is increasingly blamed for a wide range of social and environmental ills, from civil unrest in Syria to economic collapse and hurricanes, partly in an attempt to make the invisible problem of CC more tangible.

Why does this matter? Well, in recent years some scholars have argued that the Anthropocene may herald an end to the nature-culture divide -- the idea that there are humans, and then there is an external, untouched nature "out there" separate from us. E.g., Bruno Latour

BUT, @DrRobBellamy and I argue that extreme event attribution -- and similar modeling technologies -- actually recreate the nature-culture divide through modeling practices, by attempting to separate out the influence of humans and nonhumans in extreme events.