International Commission on the History of Meteorology

(Cross post from the Climate History Network)

IPO Building, Room 0.11, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands

31st Oct – 1st Nov 2013.

ABSTRACT:

Climate models influence our understanding of climate change, its causes and its future. They are a central technology of climate science. But they are also sources of information for far-reaching policy decisions, sites of multidisciplinary integration, products of distributed epistemic labor and much more. As a consequence, climate models are of significant interest to scholars in philosophy, history of science, and science and technology studies. This workshop will bring together well-regarded scholars in these fields along with established climate scientists to explore the epistemic, ethical and socio-political roles that climate models play, their interactions and implications.

On June 6-7, 2013, Georgetown University’s Mortara Center for International Studies hosted the workshop “Colonialism and Climate History,” organized by John McNeill, Franz Mauelshagen, Eleonora Rohland, and Jean-François Mouhot.  The presenters, both historians and geographers, explored perceptions, reconstructions, impacts, and adaptations to climate, climate change, and extreme weather in the colonial context.  Coverage ranged from the early modern period to the Cold War; and while most presentations focused on the Americas, two papers also examined case studies in East Africa and Indochina.

Click here to download a full list of presenters and topics.

Contemporary debates over the ‘imminent’ climate change threat coupled with the fixation on the apparent acceleration in anthropogenic global warming, have obscured a long, complex and dynamic cultural history of public engagement with climate and the  distinctive meaning that climate holds, and has held in the past, for different places and people at a range of scales.  Recent scholarship, however, has highlighted that one way to ‘re-culture’ climate discourses is to explore “…local weather and… the relationships between weather and local physical objects and cultural practices” (Hulme, 2008).

The weather is and has been woven into our experiences of modern life in many ways. Particular social norms and cultural contexts, however, shape the way in which weather is conceptualised and experienced, which in turn, together with the knowledge of events in the recallable past, determines whether and how weather becomes inscribed into the social memory and cultural fabric of communities.

The purpose of ‘Talking Weather’ is to bring together individuals with an interest in weather study and cultural histories of the weather, to explore the ways in which people engage with and ascribe meanings to the weather and make sense of it. Specifically the event will provide a forum to discuss different methodologies and approaches that can be used to investigate and capture popular understanding of weather, weather memories and experiences.

This multidisciplinary colloquium aims at filling a gap in research by studying the numerous interdependences between weather conditions and human food. It leans on two networks: that of the IEHCA, which works on the history and the cultures of food, and that dedicated to representations of weather (Perception of climate network).

Yet, both research fields of food and meteorology train an “interscience” (Parrochia) which requires a holistic approach of a “total phenomenon” (Mauss). The human beings who are biological and social, try to establish, by collective standards, the interaction between individuals and their environment, between the inside and the outside, in an aim of control, forecast and protection.

Studying relationships between food and meteorology responds, today in highly developed western countries, to a social search for harmony with “Nature”. What about other places? The colloquium will hand over to other cultures. The themes aim to be registered both in the present time and in a historical perspective. The topic will not be the history of food or the history of climate but crossed views. The consequences of the global warming on foodstuffs, as well as past and present scarcities and famines associated with exceptional weather conditions, do not constitute the heart of the subject, because these themes have been and are still the object of numerous colloquiums.

Four axes will be explored: perceptions, rhythms, discourses, signs.