Essay for Gnosis (the Italian Journal of Intelligence), 25 January 2018 1 ‘We Always Get the Climates We Deserve’: The Tenacious Grip of Moral Accountability Mike Hulme Professor of Human Geography University of Cambridge, UK Abstract Different cosmologies, religious thought, political ideologies, social practices and scientific paradigms of knowledge all contribute to the rich cultural matrix in which theories of climatic change and causation have emerged, flourished and declined. It is exceptional for humans to think that climates change for either natural or supernatural reasons alone. Far more common in early human history, and indeed perhaps still today, is to believe that the performance of climate is tied to the behaviours of morally-accountable human actors. We therefore tend to think that we get the weather we deserve. Keywords: Cultures of Climate; The Flood; Causation; Human Agency Introduction Human anxieties about a disorderly climate are long-standing and are manifest today for example in the popular descriptions of climatic change as ‘weather weirding’ or ‘climate chaos’. Since climate is an idea which performs important functions in stabilising relationships between the human experience of weather and cultural life, when physical climates appear to change the search for explanation becomes pressing. Physical climates change through time; but so too do theories of climatic causation. Explanatory accounts of why climates change do not remain static. As cultures evolve, often in response to experiences of environmental change, cross-cultural encounters, new scientific knowledge and technological innovation, so too do explanations of climatic change and variability.