Historical Perspectives on Climate Change

Abstract

This intriguing volume provides a thorough examination of the historical roots of global climate change as a field of inquiry, from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. Based on primary and archival sources, the book is filled with interesting perspectives on what people have understood, experienced, and feared about the climate and its changes in the past. Chapters explore climate and culture in Enlightenment thought; climate debates in early America; the development of international networks of observation; the scientific transformation of climate discourse; and early contributions to understanding terrestrial temperature changes, infrared radiation, and the carbon dioxide theory of climate. But perhaps most important, this book shows what a study of the past has to offer the interdisciplinary investigation of current environmental problems.

Slow reception and under-citedness in climate change research: A case study of Charles David Keeling, discoverer of the risk of global warming

“…Concerning the future climate, the dominant sentiment was that “warmer is better”. In the 1950s the popular press began to carry articles about global cooling, which was on the public agenda until the 1970s (Fleming 1998 , pp. 131–133).…”

“…“Keeling’s first report (Keeling 1960 ) is a landmark, documenting the seasonal cycle and, more gloomily, the annual rise of CO 2 ” (Nisbet 2007 , p. 789). “Since then, the Keeling curve, the famous saw-toothed curve of rising CO 2 concentrations, has become the environmental icon of the century” (Fleming 1998 , p. 126). “Keeling’s measurements … are the single most important environmental data taken in the twentieth century” (Harris 2010 , p. 7865).…”

“…“Since then, the Keeling curve, the famous saw-toothed curve of rising CO 2 concentrations, has become the environmental icon of the century” (Fleming 1998 , p. 126).…”

Rendering settler sovereign landscapes: Race and property in the Empire State

“…Even before Jefferson articulated his racist geographical schemas, early colonists defended the character of new settlements from European theories of climate-induced racial degeneration by arguing that their work deforesting the landscape had altered the climate to a more “ideal state” for a Euroamerican population. It was widely considered that “a country, in a state of nature, covered in trees” would produce a lower race of people, as Euroamerican physician and politician Hugh Williamson wrote in the 1770s, but that as forest was cleared America would become, “a proper nursery of genius, learning, industry, and liberal arts” (in Fleming, 2005: 25). More than an intellectual exercise, technopolitical fixes to environmental questions of racial degeneration or civilization were part of public planning.…”

Meteorological Frontiers: Climate Knowledge, the West, and US Statecraft, 1800–50

“…Historians of science (Feldman 1990; Fleming 1990, 1998) have primarily approached developments in nineteenth-century meteorology by emphasizing the mid-century as a period during which meteorology emerged as a bounded domain of scientific inquiry. Complete with standardized instruments, observational data networks, conventionalized methods, and theoretical controversies that superseded speculative dogma, the established narrative concludes, meteorology came to produce a more thoroughly scientific account of weather and circumscribed physical account of climate.…”