This article argues for the importance of Europe's continental empires, Habsburg and Romanov, to the emergence of a physical-dynamical model of the global climate before World War I. It begins to identify a set of questions and methods that were distinctive of climatology as a continental-imperial science of "regionalization" with a global vision. The focus is on studies of mountain climatology by Heinrich von Ficker and A. I. Voeikov in the ecologically vulnerable regions of Tyrol and western Turkestan. This continental-imperial context deserves historians' attention because it suggests a new model for the globalization of knowledge: not simply a matter of scaling up, globalization must be understood as a process of seeing across scales, of recognizing causal connections between local, regional, and planetary phenomena. "For a change, the material for a dissertation was procured mostly with the feet." Heinz Ficker, of his research on the föhn wind in Tyrol, 1906 "Science is something beautiful, especially when you can do it on horseback." Ficker in his journal in 1913, in a mountain pass in central Asia.

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We argue that solutions-based research must avoid treating climate change as a merely technical problem, recognizing instead that it is symptomatic of the history of European and North American colonialism. It must therefore be addressed by decolonizing the research process and transforming relations between scientific expertise and the knowledge systems of Indigenous Peoples and of local communities. Partnership across diverse knowledge systems can be a path to transformative change only if those systems are respected in their entirety, as indivisible cultural wholes of knowledge, practices, values, and worldviews. This argument grounds our specific recommendations for governance at the local, national, and international scales. As concrete mechanisms to guide collaboration across knowledge systems, we propose a set of instruments based on the principles of consent, intellectual and cultural autonomy, and justice. We recommend these instruments as tools to ensure that collaborations across knowledge systems embody just partnerships in support of a decolonial transformation of relations between human communities and between humanity and the more-than-human world.

The climate crisis has raised questions about the proper scale of historical analysis in the Anthropocene. After explaining how this methodological crisis differs from an earlier stand-off between proponents of microhistory and total history, this paper suggests a role for intellectual history in moving us beyond the current debate. What is needed is a history of "scaling"; that is, we need to historicize the process of mediating between different frameworks of measurement, even those that might at first appear incommensurable. Historical examples are explored in which such a process of commensuration has allowed for a pluralism of perceptions of space and time.

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