This article argues that climate change produces discordances in established ways of understanding the

human place in nature, and so offers unique challenges and opportunities for the interpretive social
sciences. Scientific assessments such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped
establish climate change as a global phenomenon, but in the process they detached knowledge from
meaning. Climate facts arise from impersonal observation whereas meanings emerge from embedded
experience. Climate science thus cuts against the grain of common sense and undermines existing social
institutions and ethical commitments at four levels: communal, political, spatial and temporal. The
article explores the tensions that arise when the impersonal, apolitical and universal imaginary of
climate change projected by science comes into conflict with the subjective, situated and normative
imaginations of human actors engaging with nature. It points to current environmental debates in which
a reintegration of scientific representations of the climate with social responses to those
representations is taking place. It suggests how the interpretive social sciences can foster a more
complex understanding of humanity’s climate predicament. An important aim of this analysis is to offer
a framework in which to think about the human and the social in a climate that seems to render
obsolete important prior categories of solidarity and experience.