ABSTRACT
Climate is not new on the anthropological agenda; it has been immanent in ethnographic descriptions since the early days of anthropology. Immanence is a key word here, because, until fairly recently, climate was seen mainly as a basic condition of social life (Hastrup 2013a). In contrast, the contemporary phenomenon of climate change is a relatively new item on the human agenda, reflecting the fact that it became prominent on the global, political agenda only a couple of decades ago. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have been instrumental in this, with five reports to date—the first in 1990, the second in 1995, the third in 2001, the fourth in 2007, and the fifth in 2013. The messages from these reports have gained momentum over the years and are now seen as (more or less) incontrovertible within an otherwise very diversified field of climate research. Among the findings are far-reaching environmental changes around the globe, projected for both a near and a more distant future.
