How's the weather?

Climate, weather, fiction, reality

I recently read Caolinn Hughes new book, The Alternatives. After more than 20 years in academia, this novel really spoke to me. Three of her four main characters - all sisters - are academics, navigating the challenging schism of a life devoted to trying to deeply understand some aspect of our natural or social world, while working for a corporatized bureaucracy that has its own distinct demands and rhythms. As this novel shows, often our students are the falafal in this sandwich.

Hughes’ characters are all grappling with climate in one way or another. And so naturally in an interview about this novel, Hughes was asked about climate change as a theme in her writing. Unless you set your story in a time before we knew what our fossil fueled cultures were doing to this planet, she answered, climate is becoming harder and harder to ignore:

I just don’t think that you can avoid it anymore in any fiction unless you’re writing something historical. There’s a cliche that all writing starts with descriptions of weather, and often closes with weather … Climate change is contemporary realism. It will become stranger and stranger to avoid it in your fiction. 

Fiction needs weather. Well, we all do: we live our day-to-day lives experiencing our momentary, local weather. Characters in novels live in a particular time and particular space. When a writer wants their reader to experience and feel the world that a character is living in, describing weather is inevitably part of putting the reader into that particular moment of the writer’s fictional world.

When you think about the weather, do you also think about the climate?

The weather in us

I love the word ‘weather’. It’s is an old, old word in English. Old enough to belong to actual Old English - the language of the Anglo-Saxons, the people in England when the Vikings arrived. It was 'weder' back then. The standard Old English Dictionary shows the word in examples like 'God's power ordereth all weathers'.

The age of the word 'weather' reflects how significant it is and has been. Weather is an everyday thing. Exchanging pleasantries over the weather is an established meme, a topic we can share with loved ones or with strangers. Weather is our daily companion. Many Old English words have not survived down the ages, but weather has weathered nearly a millennia and a half of cultural and technological change.

The Oxford English Dictionary - the OED to its friends - shows that 'weather' has many natural compounds. A compound is a combination of words that go together often enough they stick and create a new concept.

The compound words for 'weather' reflect its evolution over centuries, with old combinations like 'weatherproof', 'weatherboard', 'weatherworn', 'weathervane', and 'weather-eye'. Some of these compounds have come and gone. We no longer have 'weather-wizards'. Towards the end of the 19th century, English adopted the term 'weather forecast', and with it 'weatherman' gets a makeover, and the words 'weatherwoman' and 'weathergirl' are invented.

'Weatherboy' is not in this paradigm - it exists in a tiny part of the internet, as a mildly derogative term for a meteorologist.

At a time of increasing weather instability, it is ironic that the word 'weather' is relatively stable. According to the OED, its most recent compound term is 'weather satellite', which comes into use around 1960.

Climate: the new kid on the block

'Climate', on the other hand, is a modern concept. The word itself comes into Middle English - think Canterbury Tales, or King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - around 700 years after 'weather'. In its early days, 'climate' didn't have our modern meaning. It belonged to medieval geography, and had a dalliance with astrology. It's a few hundred years more before it becomes the word we know today.

‘Climate’ and ‘weather’ are separated by a millennia of years in their historical origins, and by distinctive perspectives: one is grounded in everyday life, the other, in the accumulation of daily observations of over time, the averaging of temperature, precipitation, sunshine, cloud and wind. As Mark Twain once quipped:

‘climate is what you expect, while weather is what you get’.

But now climate and weather are getting closer together. What scientists have been telling us to expect is morphing into what we are increasingly getting. Unbreathable urban landscapes. Extreme and even fatal heatwaves. Roads and backyards collapsing into themselves. Walls of water carrying vehicles and other detritus in their wake, accompanied by human emissions of emotion we may not yet have words for. So called 'natural' disasters? What do we call them now? Un-natural disasters? Manmade natural disasters?

'Weather' is - or has been - safe territory. The stuff of small talk. Material for pop songs: 'It's raining men'. 'Here comes the sun'. 'Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow'. But 'climate' is a battleground. You're not supposed to put these two words in the same sentence, to explain weather extremes in relation to climate. A lot of people - like fossil fuel executives and media moguls, oil men and newspaper men - have worked very hard to keep these two words apart.

From the weather's point of view - and so, for contemporary fiction writers - it's getting harder and harder to ignore climate. Climate is knocking at the door. It's tired of being in a fossil fueled shadow - it's ready for a bit of the limelight. But it's a brave meteorologist that invites the climate into the daily weather forecast. Weatherman Chris Gloninger got PTSD from bringing climate and weather together for the good people of Des Moines, Iowa. In the misinformation storms which raged around the recent Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the US, some meteorologists received death threats, and were accused of ‘controlling’ the weather.

While the word ‘weather’ has been pretty stable, ‘climate’ shows its battle scars. Our dictionaries know this, because they keep a weather-eye on how language is being pushed and pulled. They show us what we have been up to. The late 20th and 21st century reality contest over climate can be read off in our word innovations. 'Climate' has graduated from the science academy into a political boxing ring.

Take a look at the words jostling for attention around climate: not just 'climate change', but 'climate crisis', 'climate emergency' and 'climate catastrophe'. The dictionary entry for climate also includes 'climate action', 'climate justice', and 'climate strike'. It also shows the changing emotional landscape around climate, with terms like 'climate anger', 'climate anxiety', 'climate fear', and 'climate grief', as a wrote about in this post. A 'climate depression' is not a weather pattern, but a psychological state.

Endings, but no spoilers

While Bri Lee is bravely setting out on a book review live chat titled ‘Spoiler Alert’, where, as the name suggests, you need to make sure you got to the end of the book if you are showing up, I don’t want to spoil the ending of The Alternatives. Instead I want to share the feeling of reading this story, of feeling the world through these characters, most especially Olwen. To capture this experience, I feel like I need the adjective from the word ‘precipice’, but not the one that we have in our lexicon. ‘Precipitous’ means something that happens suddenly, but I want the word that describes how it feels to know you standing right on the edge, because this is how Olwen feels -’precipicey’, if I can coin that term. Hughes’ brings this deeply thoughtful work to a close, with her four sisters in some way renewed, despite what they all know is already happening. I very much recommend this book, and loved this review by Mel Fulton, published atBri Lee’s News & Reviews.

The Woman Who Can’t Stand Up But Must Keep Going