Climate and history: a critical review of historical climatology and climate change historiography

Abstract

This paper provides a critical analysis of recent climate history (or historical climatology) scholarship. It identifies four key subfields in this historiography of climate change. First, it examines scholarship on climate reconstructions that use a variety of innovative historical sources to document past climatic conditions. Second, it analyzes scholarship on social impacts and responses to climate change. This literature is prolific with significant attention given to climatic variability and climatic or weather-related disasters. Third, the paper discusses research on the uses and abuses of climate knowledge, such as innovations in meteorology and climatology as well as ways that Western climate knowledge helped justify colonialism and perpetuate racism. Fourth, the paper examines research on cultural constructions and perceptions of climate. This includes analysis of diverse climatic understandings and climate narratives that have varied across time and space. While the climate historiography is steadily expanding and constantly probing new areas, this paper contends that the field overall would benefit from a stronger emphasis on social history to examine race, class, and gender in climate history while also focusing on how social relations and power dynamics affect human-climate interactions. Additionally, it argues that the uncovering of more diverse climate meanings and narratives, partly through better social history, could both enrich the historiography and contribute to today's broader discussions about global climate change in the past and future.

Climate science and slow violence: A view from political geography and STS on mobilizing technoscientific ontologies of climate change

“…Different cultures understand and communicate about weather, seasons, and climate through context-specific lived experience, practices, rituals and myths (Strauss and Orlove 2003). There has been considerable scholarly work to examine interpretations of climate across different cultures, historical contexts, and methods of interpretations (see Carey, 2012). The Journal of Historical Geography devoted a special issue to narratives of climate change as stories situated in place and time with particular visual representations and understandings of agency (see Daniels & Endfield, 2009).…”

Tecnopolíticas das mudanças climáticas: modelos climáticos, geopolítica e governamentalidade

“…Like other maps, climate maps represent power and are valued because they offer projections useful in planning and ordering a territory (Carey, 2012). In this sense, cartographic patterns provide frameworks of intelligibility for climate phenomena, affording the State a certain way of interpreting these phenomena (Scott, 1998).…”

Anthropocene and Transdisciplinarity

“…After all, human population patterns, economies, and governance frameworks are measurable and quantifiable. Likewise, historical and archaeological research have provided quantitative and qualitative data on environmental phenomena for developing and testing scientific theses (Carey 2012). On the other hand ethnography, social and cultural history, environmental ethics, and postcolonial literary criticism have been tangential to environmental science.…”