ABSTRACT

The relationship between climate and society has always been dynamic. Physical climates have played important roles in the biological and social evolution of human beings and fashioned the biogeophysical systems which provide the goods and services from which human economic and cultural life emerges. Similarly, humans have imposed themselves upon climate, both in the ways in which climates have been imagined, studied, and articulated in thought and language and in the growing influences that human actions have had on the physical operations of climate.