climate scholarship

As mentioned in the Jan 15 blistered orb post, the research annual Osiris published an issue with the title klima.  This journal deals with the history of science, and its most recent 2011 issue, volume 27, concerns scholarly aspects of the investigation of climate.  The front flap of Osiris says that the volumes in this series 'are designed to dissolve boundaries between history and the history of science' and that they 'cast science in the framework of larger issues prominent in the historical discipline but infrequently treated in the history of science, such as the development of civil society, urbanization, and the evolution of international affairs.'  In the introduction, the issue editors write, 'we have named this volume klima.  This terse but dynamic moniker fits the tone of the contributions, which revive a multivocal and inclusive understanding of a venerable but elusive term.  We seek to decouple klima from its current exclusive association with atmospheric sciences and revisit the implications of an ancient vocabulary for medical, geographical, agricultural, economic, racial, and other 'endemic' concerns.  If climate is not just about the weather, what is it? What does it seek to explain? When is climate invoked? By whom? For what purposes? How are other 'key words' linked with it, such as culture, society, civilization, time and change? In what ways is climate a proxy for other concerns such as regulation, industry, and identity?  When is it not an explanation at all?  Where is climate incarnated?  And how does it matter?'

introduction: revisiting klima
James R Fleming & Vladimir Jankovic
27 (2011): 1-15

(section: natural laboratories)

Humboldtian science, Creole meteorology, and the discovery of human-caused climate change in South America
Gregory T Cushman
27 (2011): 19-44

imperial climatographies from Tyrol to Turkestan
Deborah R Coen
27 (2011): 45-65

the anxieties of a science diplomat: field coproduction of climate knowledge and the rise of fall of Hans Ahlmann's 'Polar Warming'
Sverker Soerlin
27 (2011): 66-88

diagnosing the dry: historical case notes from Southwest Western Australia, 1945-2007
Ruth A Morgan
7 (2011): 89-108

(section: social contexts)

the letter from Dublin: climate change, colonialism, and the Royal Society in the seventeenth century
Brant Vogel
7 (2011): 111-128

inventing Caribbean climates: how science, medicine, and tourism changed tropical weather from deadly to healthy
Mark Carey
7 (2011): 129-141

reculturing and particularizing climate discourses: weather, identity, and the work of Gordon Manley
Georgina Endfield
7 (2011): 142-162

(section: international to global)

concentrating on the CO2: the Scandinavian and Arctic measurements
Maria Bohn
7 (2011): 165-179

melting empires? climate change and politics in Antarctica since the International Geophysical Year
Adrian Howkins
7 (2011): 180-197

the politics of atmospheric sciences: 'nuclear winter' and global climate change
Matthias Doerris
7 (2011): 198-223

optimal climate change: economics and climate science policy histories (from heuristic to normative)
Samuel Randalls
7 (2011): 224-242

(section: climate redux)

reducing the future to climate: a story of climate determinism and reductionism
Mike Hulme
7 (2011): 245-266