Climate Change and Memory

Abstract

‘We are familiar with statements by elderly people, such as ‘The winters were colder and the snows deeper when I was a youngster’. So reported American meteorologist J.B. Kincer in one of the earliest scientific papers to draw attention to the worldwide climate warming underway in the 1920s and 1930s.¹ Kincer’s report highlights the ‘when I was younger’ claim typical of the more elderly cohorts of nearly all societies in conversation with younger generations. In this conversation, the conclusive clause — almost universally, and certainly with recourse to a comparative or even superlative adjective — goes: ‘the summers were sunnier’, ‘the winters were colder’, ‘the ice was thicker’, ‘the rains more reliable’, ‘the seasons more predictable’.