International Commission on the History of Meteorology

(cross post from the Climate History Network)

At the American Society for Environmental History in Toronto, there will be a number of paper and panels on climate including:

• Climate history breakfast to discuss initiatives in this growing field of environmental history.  It will meet on the morning of Thursday, April 4, 7:15am in the Jasper Room.
• “East Meets West: Middle Eastern Environments and Western Eyes” (Panel 4-E), chaired by Sam White of Oberlin College. Paper presentations will be “East, West, and American Conversationism” by David Schorr of Tel Aviv University; “The Science of Sand: The East in Nineteenth Century European Climatology” by Philipp Lehmann of Harvard University; and “Getting the Goat: Disturbing Creatures and Attempts to Change the East” by Tamar Novick of Univeristy of Pennsylvania.
  Continue reading “ASEH Climate History sessions”

(cross-post from Climate History Network)

Average global temperatures fluctuate in response to many different influences, and while some of these “forcings” are now affected by humans, others are shaped entirely by natural causes. Articles on this website have considered whether sulfur released into the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions stimulated the prolonged cooling of the so-called Little Ice Age in the centuries before 1850. Deposited in the stratosphere, volcanic sulfur dioxide interacts with other chemicals to form sulfuric acid and water, which in turn reflects solar radiation. Other articles on the site have introduced research revealing that the reflective properties of man made aerosol pollution in the twentieth century likely sheltered swaths of North America and, later, parts of China from the influence of global warming. Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a new study by lead author Ryan Neely explores how these very different influences have recently interacted with the most important forcing agent of our time: the rapid rise of atmospheric greenhouse gases caused by human activity.

(cross-post from Climate History Network)

The article D.M. Anderson et al., “Global Warming in an Independent Record of the Past 130 Years,” published in Geophysical Research Letters, uses an index of 173 temperature-sensitive proxies to reconstruct global temperatures going back to 1880, and a smaller index of 67 proxies to extend the record back to 1730.  The results strongly mirror those of the instrumental record, with clear indications of accelerating warming in the 20th century.  The study notes that “The upward trend appears to begin in the early 19th century but the year-to-year variability is large and the 1730-1929 trend is small.”

Of course, for climate historians the study also serves as a nice confirmation of the validity of proxies in historical climate reconstruction.  The broad Paleo Index used in the study actually shows much stronger correlation with the instrumental record than single, local proxies tend to do.

(Cross-post from the Climate History Network)

From the 7th – 9th January, 2013 a diverse group of scholars met in Oxford for a conference on aspects of the communication of weather and climate from the 18th to the 21st centuries. Organised and hosted by the Maison Française D’Oxford in partnership with the Museum of the History of Science Oxford, the conference began with a reception at the Museum of the History of Science where attendees were treated to a private viewing of the exhibition, “Atmospheres: Investigating the Weather from Aristotle to Ozone.”