Redefining historical climatology in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Historical climatology is commonly defined as the study of past climates based on ‘documentary evidence’ before the establishment of modern networks of meteorological measurement, which excludes the last two centuries of recent global warming. This article reviews historical climatology with regard to the Anthropocene. In the Anthropocene the dynamics of climate change are essentially anthropogenic. The term ‘sociosphere’ will be advocated as a terminological improvement over existing attempts to define the place of human activities in Earth System Analysis. Theoretical and empirical advances in the study of social ecodynamics are called for. Historical climatology has a capacity to contribute making such advances, but a redefinition is inevitable for this potential to be realized: (1) historical climatology needs to expand temporally into the 19th and 20th centuries; and (2) it has yet to adjust to an important conceptual transition in climatology: from a descriptive (meteorological) concept of climate to climate dynamics.

Epidemics in Ming and Qing China: Impacts of changes of climate and economic well-being

“…Other temperature reconstructions have been conducted in China, for instance Tan et al (2003) and Yi et al (2012), but the spatial coverage of these studies failed to include the entire country. Furthermore, this reconstruction of paleoclimate by Ge et al (2013) has been regarded as one representative climatic reconstruction in China (Mauelshagen, 2014).…”

Re-thinking the present: The role of a historical focus in climate change adaptation research

“…During the early years of its existence, 'climate impact' analyses were a key component of historical climatology. These predominantly involved the comparison of climatic with demographic data to examine the relationship of climatic variability with social and economic changes at a broad scale (Mauelshagen, 2014). During the 1980s, climate impact studies declined whilst the focus at CRU moved to statistical climatology and climate modelling.…”

“…During the 1980s, climate impact studies declined whilst the focus at CRU moved to statistical climatology and climate modelling. During this time climate impact studies became primarily associated with a small number of central European historians who occupied a niche in their discipline (Mauelshagen, 2014;Mauelshagen and Pfister, 2010). Historical climate impact research migrated into historical disaster research in the late 1990s as (social scientific) disaster studies increasingly concerned itself with anthropogenic climate change using the established concepts of vulnerability, resilience and adaptation.…”

Adapting to hurricanes. A historical perspective on New Orleans from its foundation to Hurricane Katrina, 1718–2005

“…21,[34][35][36][37] Historical climatology has included geographers, meteorologists as well as historians who have-much like paleoclimatologists-connected their studies to current climate change research. [38][39][40][41][42] Climate history and historical disaster studies are largely being conducted by geographers [43][44][45] and historians 21,[46][47][48][49][50] who, however, only in a few cases interact across disciplines and with only a handful of historians actually connecting their research to present-day concerns such as climate change, let alone adaptation to climate change and climatic extreme events. The reasons for this abstinence are most likely to be found in history's disciplinary evolution, but deserve to be explored in more detail elsewhere.…”