This article examines both the role of cognition in human adaptation to climate change and the role that cognitive psychology can play in this field. We start from the assumption that human cognition, mediated by culture, plays a central role in the adaptation to climatic and environmental changes. However, the current acceleration of global climate change perturbs the cognitive treatment of climate information. The character unpredictable and highly complex of climate in addition to the fact that culture does not provide knowledge as well as cognitive tools necessary to understand it might produce cognitive vulnerability. Taking into account the environmental constraints and cultural characteristics, firstly we present some preliminary results of our fundamental research conducted among adults in New Caledonia and Paris on the representation of climate, climate change and the representation of the human capacity to adapt to global climatic changes. Secondly, we will provide a comparison of intra-cultural representation of the climate in different geographical and climatic conditions in France. Our results suggest that both culture and climatic experience affect cognitive adaptation. Parisian adults exhibit the highest cognitive vulnerability, therefore a less adaptive cognition. We believe these results can be explained by the persistence and inadaptability of analytical thinking dominant in western urban populations along with the lack of bi-metric representations.