When Climate Changed: The Fall of Empires and the Rise of a New Science

Barnard College, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The history of modern climate science has generally been written as if the field had sprung to life quite suddenly, inexplicably, and in isolation in the post-war United States. Although it was not until the 1950s that computers were introduced to simulate the global circulation and satellites began to record atmospheric data, these were shifts in technology, not in the basic theories or methods of the field. In fact, the foundations of modern climate science emerged over the century before World War Two, as climate came to be understood in terms of the exchange of energy among systems at a spectrum of scales. This project funded by the Science, Technology & Society Program focuses on the origins and development of concepts of scale in the atmospheric sciences. How did people begin to see that the familiar local weather patterns were dependent, at the smallest scale, on the transfer of energy among plants, water, air, and soil, while simultaneously embedded in far larger, ultimately planetary patterns of circulation? How did they recognize that the duration of atmospheric phenomena varies with spatial scale, making it possible to estimate the time scales on which to look for climate variations? This project argues that Europe's modern continental empires (Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Soviet, Prussian, and Nazi) provided a crucial context for these developments. These empires placed a premium on charting their own natural and human diversity. As scientific observers circulated within their borders, their attention was drawn to climatic "boundaries" and "transitional regions." Imperial scientists were charged with understanding both the factors determining the spatial differentiation of climate and the ways in which local climates participated in a continental regime of atmospheric circulation. Out of this context emerged the field of "dynamic climatology," with its characteristic attention to the composition and motion of air masses, bridging the disciplines of physics and geography and paving the way for computer modeling. At the same time, these empires served, to varying political ends, as laboratories for the study of the relationship between humans and their natural environments -- leading above all to the concept of the biosphere and to the science of bioclimatology.