The evolution of climate ideas and knowledge

Abstract

Ideas and knowledge about climate have changed considerably in history. Ancient philosophers like Hippocrates and Aristotle shaped the understandings of climate, which remained very influential until well into the eighteenth century. The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century gave rise to new ways of systematic instrument-based observation of and increased public interest in weather and climate. These developments led to a mechanistic understanding and a reductionist physical description of climate in the twentieth century, eventually in the form of a complex earth system. Furthermore, different understandings of climate coexisted in many periods of time. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries specific scientific concepts of climate (a geographical understanding of climate in climatology until about the mid-twentieth century and a physical understanding of climate in climate science in the second half of the twentieth century) gained superior social credibility and cultural dominance. The understanding of climate involved more than the accumulation of scientific knowledge. It was rooted in social processes and cultural interests, which shaped different ideas of climate in different communities of actors and different historical times .  2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. WIREs Clim Change 2010 1 581-597 'Ideas on climate change are changing faster than climate itself' [1, p. 257].

Rise of interdisciplinary research on climate

“…Additionally, if the pattern of weather systems in a region changed, did that not mean a change of climate? It was a new way of looking at things, a "dynamical climatology" as one of the Bergen group put it (14).…”

Modelling and the Nation: Institutionalising Climate Prediction in the UK, 1988–92

“…We can read this warning against regional parochialism as concerning both the structures of scientific cooperation, and the emerging interest in regional climate prediction as enabled by global models. In this 1987 formulation, climate could no longer be considered a place-bound phenomenon (Heymann 2010). Instead, the global took precedence, both as an epistemic object and a political condition.…”

Contributions and perspectives from geography to the study of climate

“…For the Austrian imperial cartographer Hann, climatography was the description of regional climates in their correlation to plant cover and the organization of human life . Köppen advocated for a systematic collection of data and methodology of interpretation, such as is evident in the production of Köppen's climate maps in the 1860s and the formation of the Köppen classification scheme that continued to play a significant role in geography climate textbooks through the 20th century . Köppen, it is worth noting, contributed to debates about the quality of Eurasian steppes which were central to questions of the likely success of European colonization within central Asia .…”

“…There are a few important caveats about the scope and ambition of this paper. First, while there are geographically inspired approaches to climate prior to the formal establishment of geography as an academic discipline, I direct readers to the article by Heymann for this . Second, the choice of authors or subfields is not to delimit the scope of other contributions within geography.…”