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’.