External Conditions Are Climate
metaphor
Source: Natural Phenomena → Event Structure
Categories: cognitive-sciencelinguisticsphilosophy
From: Master Metaphor List
Transfers
The conditions surrounding us are the weather. This metaphor maps atmospheric and climatic phenomena — storms, sunshine, droughts, seasons, temperature — onto the abstract domain of external circumstances: the economic, political, social, and emotional environment in which people and institutions operate. The metaphor is pervasive because climate is the paradigmatic example of conditions beyond individual control: you cannot change the weather, you can only prepare for it and endure it.
Key structural parallels:
- Favorable conditions as good weather — “A sunny economic outlook.” “The political climate has improved.” “Fair winds for the industry.” When circumstances are favorable, the metaphor maps them onto clear skies, warmth, and calm. Prosperity is sunshine; opportunity is a favorable breeze.
- Unfavorable conditions as bad weather — “A storm is brewing in the financial markets.” “They weathered the crisis.” “A chilling effect on free speech.” Adversity is mapped onto storms, cold, darkness, and turbulence. The metaphor emphasizes the uncontrollable, impersonal nature of difficult circumstances — they blow in from outside, and individuals can only shelter and wait.
- Gradual change as seasons — “The political season is changing.” “A thaw in diplomatic relations.” “The winter of their discontent.” Slow, cyclical changes in external conditions are mapped onto seasonal transitions. This imports the expectation of cyclicality: bad conditions will eventually give way to better ones, just as winter yields to spring.
- Overwhelming conditions as natural disasters — “A flood of regulations.” “An avalanche of criticism.” “The perfect storm of economic factors.” When conditions become extreme, the metaphor escalates to catastrophic weather events. These are mapped as beyond anyone’s capacity to manage — forces of nature that simply happen to people.
- Endurance as weathering — “The company weathered the recession.” “Storm-tested leadership.” “They’ve been through some rough weather.” Surviving difficult conditions is mapped onto surviving bad weather: the entity that endures is toughened by exposure, like wood that has been weathered.
Limits
- External conditions are often human-made — the climate metaphor treats circumstances as natural and impersonal, like weather that just happens. But economic recessions, political crises, and social upheavals are products of human decisions, policies, and power structures. Calling a financial crisis a “storm” obscures the roles of regulators, bankers, and politicians who created the conditions. The metaphor depoliticizes what is political.
- The metaphor encourages passivity — if conditions are climate, then the appropriate response is to endure and wait for better weather. This framing discourages agency: you cannot change the weather, so why try to change the economy or the political system? The metaphor is especially convenient for those who benefit from existing conditions and want to discourage reform.
- Cyclicality is not guaranteed — the seasonal mapping implies that bad times will naturally cycle back to good times. But many adverse conditions are not cyclical: ecological collapse, democratic backsliding, and chronic poverty do not automatically reverse. The expectation of spring after winter can produce dangerous complacency.
- The metaphor obscures uneven exposure — real weather affects everyone in a region roughly equally. But “economic climate” and “political climate” affect different people very differently. The metaphor’s suggestion of shared exposure hides the fact that some people have shelter (wealth, privilege, mobility) and others are exposed. A recession is not the same “storm” for a billionaire and a minimum-wage worker.
- Scale mismatches — climate operates on time scales of decades to millennia; weather operates on hours to weeks. The metaphor conflates these, using “climate” for conditions that may last only months and “storm” for crises that persist for years. The temporal structure of the source domain does not reliably map onto the target.
Expressions
- “The political climate has shifted” — changed conditions as changed weather patterns
- “A storm is brewing in the markets” — approaching crisis as approaching bad weather
- “They weathered the recession” — surviving adversity as enduring bad weather
- “A chilling effect on investment” — discouraging conditions as cold temperature
- “A thaw in relations between the two countries” — improving conditions as warming
- “The economic outlook is sunny” — favorable conditions as clear weather
- “A perfect storm of circumstances” — convergence of adverse conditions as extreme weather event
- “The winter of discontent” — a period of unhappiness as a cold season
- “Fair-weather friends” — people who are present only under good conditions
- “A cloud hanging over the negotiations” — persistent threat as overcast sky
Origin Story
The Master Metaphor List (Lakoff, Espenson & Schwartz 1991) documents EXTERNAL CONDITIONS ARE CLIMATE as a mapping from the weather domain to the domain of external circumstances. The metaphor is ancient — one of the earliest and most universal ways humans have understood their social environment. Shakespeare’s “winter of our discontent” (Richard III, 1593) is one of many literary deployments, but the everyday expressions (“stormy times,” “fair weather,” “weathering a crisis”) predate literary usage by centuries.
The metaphor’s productivity has increased in modern discourse, particularly in economics and business. “Business climate,” “investment climate,” and “regulatory climate” are now standard terms in policy discussion, so conventionalized that they function as technical vocabulary rather than recognized metaphors. This makes them especially powerful: the metaphorical framing (conditions are natural, impersonal, and uncontrollable) operates below conscious awareness, shaping assumptions about agency and responsibility.
References
- Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “External Conditions Are Climate”
- Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Chapters 6-7
- Shakespeare, W. Richard III (1593), Act 1, Scene 1 — “Now is the winter of our discontent”
Related Entries
Structural Neighbors
Entries from different domains that share structural shape. Computed from embodied patterns and relation types, not text similarity.
- Desire Is Hunger (food-and-cooking/metaphor)
- Intense Emotions Are Heat (embodied-experience/metaphor)
- Emotions Are Weather (weather/metaphor)
- Intoxication Is Getting A Burden (embodied-experience/metaphor)
- Amara's Law (perception-and-cognition/mental-model)
- Let the Buyer Beware (economics/mental-model)
- Loved One Is A Possession (economics/metaphor)
- Mental Accounting (economics/metaphor)
Structural Tags
Patterns: containerforcescale
Relations: causetransform
Structure: cycle Level: generic
Contributors: agent:metaphorex-miner