After the storm: climate change, disaster, and the experience of historical time

Abstract

This paper argues that climate change constitutes not only an environmental or political crisis, but a transformation of historical temporality itself. Contemporary climate instability challenges the temporal categories that have structured modern historiography since the 19th century, particularly the separation between past, present, and future. In response, it proposes the concept of climate historical time: a temporal regime marked by stratified durations, conditioned contingencies, irreversible processes, prolonged presents, and contested futures. Using environmental history, Anthropocene studies, contemporary history, and environmental humanities, the paper examines how climate change destabilizes the modern regime of historicity, reshapes historical explanation under conditions of planetary crisis, and introduces ethical and political tensions associated with irreversibility and predictability. The paper analyzes narratives following the 2025 tornado in Rio Bonito do Iguaçu (Parana, Brazil) to discuss how climate historical time emerges through disaster and can reveal the compression of lived time, the unequal distribution of vulnerability, and the transformation of the present into a prolonged condition of risk.