Is Bergen Unseasonal? On Europe’s Shifting Relation to Seasons

Scott Bremer

European Review, 2024, vol. 32, issue 4, 453-467

Abstract: This article reflects on whether and how European communities’ cultural frameworks of seasons are coming to poorly correspond to the climatic conditions they experience, and the implications for how Europe adapts to climatic (and social and environmental) change. It starts from a colder- and drier-than-normal autumn and winter (2023/2024) in Bergen, Norway, and a local researcher’s investigation into why these climatically anomalous seasons were being culturally celebrated as ‘seasonal weather’. He compares studies into the Bergen population’s cultural expectations for weather conditions in each of the four seasons, with the statistical climatic record, and reveals a mismatch. He argues that the four-season framework prominent in Europe poorly describes or anticipates meteorology in Bergen, and that other frameworks could fit better. The article argues that seasonal frameworks continuously evolve with interlinked environmental and social change – from drivers such as climate change, landscape modification, social evolution, and globalization – so that seasonal mismatches are as much about how societies culturally re-conceive of seasons as about physical climate change for instance. This is important because the way European societies divide the year by seasonal expectations affects how they relate to the meteorological conditions they come to face each season.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:eurrev:v:32:y:2024:i:4:p:453-467_13

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().