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Crises framed by weather metaphors
Correlating a Requisite Diversity of Metaphorical Patterns (Part #5)
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There are detailed studies of the extent to which weather metaphors are used to frame crises (Maria Enriqueta Cortes de los Rios, Cognitive Devices to Communicate the Economic Crisis: an analysis through covers of The Economist. Iberica, 2010; Antonella Luporini, Metaphor in Times of Crisis: metaphorical representations of the global crisis in The Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore 2008, 2013; Daniele Besomi, Tempests of the Business World: weather metaphors for crises in the Nineteenth Century, 2014).
It is appropriate to emphasize again that in practice -- as indicated in The Economist, The Financial Times, and the business press in general -- use is made of weather metaphors rather than climate metaphors, irrespective of any other discussion of the politics and economics of "climate change" and reference to the "business climate" -- but not to "business weather" (cf. Ifo Business Climate Index). It could be emphasized that it is through weather that people experience globality -- not through climate.
In the case of the continuing crises of politics, use of a range of metaphors has been noted by Andrew J. Gallagher (A Perfect Storm! Metaphors of Weather, Metaphor in American Politics, 28 July 2014):
weather, climate, rain money, rain check, rain on the parade, get wind of, windfall, swirling rumors, cloudy skies, black cloud hanging over, clouded judgment, stormy weather, brainstorming, perfect storm, storm back, storm out, lightning round, distant thunder
As a means of referring indirectly (if not surreptitiously) to crisis conditions, the role of weather metaphors has been noted by Ping-hui Liao (Weather as Metaphor in Modern Chinese Literature, 2007):
However, modern Chinese writers and artists do deploy from time to time bitter weather conditions as metaphors to give expression to people's struggles against hardships and interregna, against alienation or pollution. Cao Yu's theatrical treatment of thunder and storm immediately comes to mind, while many other literary references to drought and flood abound to suggest that Chinese modernity is filled with tensions and difficult transitions. But most surprising of all is that quite a few modern Chinese literary texts, together with some by prominent Japanese poets and novelists who visited such colonies as Taiwan, highlight heat and humidity as a modern albeit colonial (or even postcolonial) theme of cultural predicament... In Cao Yu, the storm serves as an allegorical background to raise question of the condition of possibility for liberation that does not take place. The sentiment of entrapment and despair functions to keep critical enterprises of modernity in check. Weather is used here metaphorically, as a critical trope, to address risks and anxieties embedded in social change....
Literal or figurative, the allusions to weather conditions in modern Chinese literature appear to be operant on exposing the limits of pre-modern cosmology and moral-political orders. Detailed descriptive accounts of drought, incessant rain, and heat, among others, function to lay bare the traditional belief that heaven provides holistic support to the people. But the miserable weather conditions also serve to criticize Chinese (or, in the case of Taiwan) and Japanese regime for their misdirected modernity projects. Bad weather sums up as a metaphor of entrapment and despair. Pollution and poverty, along side with new energy generated by hot money and speed, are often issues surrounding the weather conditions and human miseries. Of course, these literary expression s call attention to problems embedded in Chinese modernity. And Chinese intellectuals are now urging us to do something about the strange weather we are having
Intelligent analysis through weather metaphors: Given the above-mentioned comments by Krugman (2012), it is remarkable to note the case made for the use of weather as a framework for systemic analysis, as presented by Phillip J. Ayoub, et al (Weather Systems: a new metaphor for intelligence analysis. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 2007):
With the recent catastrophic outcomes in U.S. intelligence capabilities we suggest that current design metaphors are inadequate to address the changing reality of U.S. intelligence needs. In-depth interviews and concept mapping efforts with intelligence analysts suggest that the intelligence domain be characterized as a distributed cognitive work system. Current mechanical or information processing metaphors that encourage techno-centric system design solutions neglect the emergent, pluralistic and distributed nature of information that supports situational awareness and decision making in the intelligence domain. Instead, we suggest that weather systems are a more appropriate metaphor for understanding the cognitive activity of intelligence analysts and to guide the design of cognitive aides, information sharing and knowledge management systems, and data processing tools used to support intelligence work.
Especially intriguing, in the light of Krugman's reference to the "dishpan" simulation by Fultz, is the initiative at the MIT Media Lab to construct a "weathertank" (Stefan Marti, Deva Seetharam and Hiroshi Ishii, WeatherTank: a tangible interface using weather metaphors, 2001), framed in the following terms:
Metaphors -- concrete images that illuminate abstract ideas -- are common in user interface design. We propose to use the rich and well-understood natural phenomena of weather as metaphors to represent abstract information from other domains. Many people, irrespective of educational level, literacy, and profession, understand weather metaphors intuitively. In this paper, we present WeatherTank, a tangible visualization system that uses weather metaphors to give an overview over information, employing our visual, tactile, and -- indirectly -- aural and olfactory senses. WeatherTank conveys a weather metaphor in a different way than a verbal description does, because it predominantly uses cognitive resources of our spatial/visual thinking (right hemisphere), conflicting less with our busy verbal/vocal brain processes (left hemisphere). Furthermore, unlike pictures and movies of weather, WeatherTank also employs our tactile and olfactory senses, taking advantage of the richness of multimodal human senses and skills developed through our lifetimes of interaction with the physical world
Applications for the approach have been explored by the authors (Stefan Marti and Deva Seetharam, WeatherTank: interface for non-literate communities and ambient visualization tool). Within the context of this argument, the challenge lies in the literacy required to read "the writing on the wall", given the script in which it may be written, and the contrast between non-literate and experiential.
The recognized relevance of metaphor to national security is made apparent by the launch of a major new programme -- The Metaphor Program of the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (Alexis Madrigal, Why Are Spy Researchers Building a 'Metaphor Program'?, The Atlantic, 25 May 2011). A significant participant is the US Army Research Laboratory -- slogan: Technology Driven - Warfighter Focused.
Ironically the focus on metaphor in the Media Lab "weathertank" experiment serves to reinforce the point made above with respect to the dishpan experiment. To an unexplored degree, people are now both "dishpans" and "weathertanks". The Media Lab effectively offers a metaphor of its operations as a renowned "think tank" which merits separate attention in this context ("Tank-thoughts" from "Think-tanks": metaphors constraining development of global governance, 2003; Meta-challenges of the Future for Networking through Think-tanks, 2005). Given this preoccupation with forecasting and decision-making, think tanks illustrate the ambiguity between "weather tank" and "whether tank".
Weather, emotions and psychosocial unease: The relationship between weather and emotion has long been a theme of research (Alan E. Stewart, Assessing Human Dimensions of Weather and Climate Salience, 2005). It is usefully noted by Tina B. Tessina (Emotions as Weather).
In a period of intense global modelling of climate change, it is to be expected that the use of simulation should be extended to tendencies to "social unrest", now of increasing concern to security services. These tendencies are now gleaned from use of characteristic phrases in social media and other electronic communications mined for such purposes -- as an extension of surveillance for security purposes.
One useful summary of modelling and simulation in relation to social unrest is provided within the context of the OECD /IFP Project on "Future Global Shocks" (Ortwin Renn, Aleksandar Jovanovic and Regina Schröter, "Social Unrest", 2011). It might be asked whether their reference to "weather" is usefully distinguished from "climate" in the following:
Agent-based models run computer simulations to explore emerging dynamical patterns, free from any top-down assumptions. In contrast to conventional models, ABMs make no assumptions about the existence of efficient policies or general equilibrium, these may or may not emerge due to the dynamical rules. The policies and social behaviors that they generate are more like the weather system, subject to constant storms and seizures of all sizes. Big fluctuations and even crashes are often inherent features. That is because ABMs allow feedback mechanisms that can amplify small effects, such as the herding and panic that generate bubbles and crashes. In mathematical terms the models are -- non-linear, meaning that effects need not be proportional to their causes...
Nevertheless, a real-time simulation, fed by masses of data that would operate rather like the current traffic or weather forecasting models (projecting various possible futures!) is the only way to go in the future and if a suite of such models is to be used, such a suite will probably have to be built step-by-step, probably around a core system which will serve as a reference.
How "emotional weather" patterns are to be simulated globally as a means of detecting "unease" may then prove to be a preoccupation of ambitious initiatives such as:
- the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), intended as a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information" with a node representing "every man, woman and child"
- the FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator, a multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems.
Weather metaphors in poetry and prose: As indicated with respect to use of weather metaphors to articulate understanding of crisis conditions in Chinese society, it is in literature and poetry that subtler distinctions may be meaningfully made between the experience of many different kinds of weather. One remarkable study is that of Judit Nagy (Metaphors of Weather in Canadian Short Prose, Brno Studies in English, 2011) summarized as follows:
The first part of the paper presents some theoretical grounding, proceeding from the overt-covert and direct-indirect relationship of tenor and vehicle to Lakoff's cognitive concept of metaphor (1980, 1993). Based on this concept, the linguistic Great Chain of Weather Metaphors is created. The second part of the paper makes an attempt at examining the most typical source and target domains of weather, and, based on a pilot sample, it also looks into conceptual weather metaphors built by mapping at each level of the Great Chain of Weather Metaphors
This offers two orderings, as indicated below. In that on the left Great Chain characters are projected onto weather, whereas in the second type, weather is projected onto Great Chain characters.
| The Great Chain of Weather Metaphors | |
| x<w correspondences | w<x correspondences |
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A related study has been made by Izabela Zolnowska (Weather as the source domain for metaphorical expressions. Avant: the Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard, 2011)
The aim of the study is to demonstrate the pervasiveness of concepts related to "weather" that indicate the presence or absence of problems in human mind. The linguistic material that is the subject of the analysis is the language used in everyday communication. An additional claim is that the directionality of metaphorical transfer is uniform and proceeds from concrete to abstract concepts. Furthermore, I will try to show that talking about the presence or absence of problems in terms related to "weather" is systematic and forms a coherent network of metaphorical expressions whose structuring is partial. The final claim I would like to make is that the expressions that reflect the concept have a common experiential basis, and it is only because of its presence that the metaphor can be comprehended
The paper categorized the examples collected into certain conceptual metaphors. The source domain for all these concepts constitutes the lexicon describing "weather conditions", whereas the target domain constitutes the presence or absence of problems. The following conceptual metaphors were identified by Zolnowska:
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A valuable checklist of common weather metaphors is provided by John D. Casnig (A Language of Metaphors. Knowgramming.com, 1997-2013), who also has more extensive examples in each case:
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