ABSTRACT
Local Climate Change and Society goes beyond the current debate between climate-change deniers and believers, and the polemic about whether it is a global phenomenon induced by anthropogenic or natural factors. It conceptual- izes climate change as a phenomenon, which has brought about socioeconomic and environmental transformations as significant and wide-ranging as>The Great Transformation described by Polanyi:
A system developed inleaps and bounds; it engulfed space and time, and by creating bank money it produced a dynamic hitherto unknown. By the time it reached its maximum extent, around 1914, every part of the globe, all its inhabitants and yet unborn generations, physical persons as well as huge fictitious bodies called corporations, were comprised in it. A new way oflife spread over the planet with a claim to universality unparalleled since the age when Christianity started out on its career, only this time the movement was on a purely material level.
(1944: 130)