Abstract

As the scientific distinction between climate and weather suggests, knowledge about climate is supposed to be beyond indigenous peoples’ everyday experience of the environment in that it requires a long‐term record. On the basis of ethnographic work among geoscientists in Scotland and West Greenland, I show that practitioners of this discipline have mastered the craft of turning ‘visible’ what is ‘invisible’ to the senses by playing with shorter time‐scales. In thinking and communicating about the past, geoscientists would compress and accelerate long‐term environmental processes, often at the cost of dissociating them from processes occurring at shorter time‐scales, particularly the adaptation of living organisms. Attending to the historical circumstances around the development of this skill, I argue that it relates to an ideal of objectivity in science that corresponds to an optical understanding of time, inspired by the image of the telescope. Challenging the distinction between climate and weather, and the epistemic distance on which it rests, I discuss recent approaches in environmental anthropology that have uncritically adopted this distinction to distinguish indigenous knowledge of the environment from climate science. In conclusion, informed by research with indigenous peoples of the Arctic, I speculate on alternative ways of understanding climate knowledge, beyond the climate‐weather distinction.