International Commission on the History of Meteorology

June 25-26, 2015 at Museum Luneburg

Dealing with Climate Change: Calculus & Catastrophe in the Age of Simulation

Computer simulations have risen to prominence as primary tools of producing and negotiating knowledge about global climate change and its future trajectories. Scientists investigate climate change as an actual possibility since they have studied the Earth system behaviour with the by now predominant research technologies of simulation; policy experts explore the scope of action and project the latent catastrophic fortunes of humankind and how they might be prevented or postponed; intellectuals struggle with the autonomous nature of models in light of the categorical limits to knowledge about uncertainties. Simulations provide the virtual topographies to deal with climate change.

The conference aims to investigate the multiple meanings and practices of computer simulation both in the field of climate research itself as well as in the broader socio-cultural dynamics. By bringing together scholars from different backgrounds in simulation thought, study and practice the conference will explore how computer simulations mediate between the data, models, visualisations, algorithms and calculations rendering climate change knowable and the cultural, social and political imaginaries of climate change.

Concept & organisation: Isabell Schrickel and Christoph Engemann

The event is free and open to the public but registration is required.

To register, please send an email to mecs@leuphana.de.

The American Meteorological Society has issued a call for papers for its 96th annual meeting, January 10-14, 2016 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Abstracts for the 14th annual history symposium are due August 3.

From 20-21 November 2014, a group of historians, science studies scholars, and representatives from the Norwegian weather service met for a workshop titled, “Climate in meteorology, meteorology in climate studies.”  Organised by the History of Meteorology Group at the University of Bergen, the workshop was hosted in the university’s Geophysical Institute, the home of the Bergen School of Meteorology that was responsible for the development of so many foundational concepts of modern meteorology and climatology. Aided by travel grants from the International Commission for the History of Meteorology, the workshop was an opportunity for early career researchers to present papers alongside senior researchers from the field and discuss at length aspects of climate studies’ history, development, and relationship with meteorology.

Attendees at the ‘Climate in meteorology, meteorology in climate studies’ workshop stood on the stairs in the University of Bergen’s Geophysical Institute, where many illustrious figures from the history of meteorology have previously stood (Photograph courtesy of Dania Achermann).

University of Warwick, 16 May 2015

CfP Deadline: 10 December 2014

http://warwick.ac.uk/RulingClimate

‘Ruling Climate’ aims to explore the relationship between cultural perceptions of the environment and practical attempts at environmental regulation and change between 1500 and 1800.

In the early modern period, the environment became a privileged locus of scientific debate and governmental action. Discussions spread across Europe and its colonies as to how to improve the land, and possibly even the climate of a given place; practical efforts were made to enhance the healthiness, productivity, and overall pleasantness of the environment (both natural and built) in the belief that environmental ‘improvement’, as it was then called, would immediately bring about human improvement—a larger, healthier, happier population that would make the country more powerful. Such debates and practices were driven by a persistent belief in the influence that landscape, weather and climate would exert on human beings, both at a physical and a spiritual level. ‘Climate theories’—first advanced by ancient authors such as Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle and Ptolemy—remained a popular explanatory paradigm throughout the early modern period, actively dictating trends in environmental management, social governance, and the administration of both private and public health, as well as shaping colonial attitudes to foreign climates and peoples. Yet the period between 1500 and 1800 was also one of substantial intellectual, scientific, and technological change in which new conceptions of nature, climate, and weather were developed. The human footprint on Earth grew heavier, whilst the first moves towards conservation and sustainable resource management were made. Finally, it was in this period that changing climatic patterns were observed for the first time, partly because of a cooling trend that reached its peak around 1650 (the so-called Little Ice Age).

16^th International Conference of Historical Geographers (ICHG)

Dates: Sunday 5 to Friday 10 July 2015

Location: Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London, SW7 2AR

Website: www.ichg2015.org