Climate by Proxy A History of Scientific Reconstructions of the Past and Future

About this book

How twentieth-century scientists used proxies to understand historic climates, shaping scientific analyses of the past and the future.

Unlike our daily reckoning with the weather, our experience of climate must be mediated through tools that record the ebb and flow of climate over millions of years, such as computer models, instruments like thermometers, and organic and inorganic remains. Climate by Proxy by Melissa Charenko explores how scientists read the record of past climates and how their readings have engendered particular understandings of climate. Charenko focuses on the twentieth century, a period when scientists in Europe and North America began to believe that climate had a dynamic history worth studying. Scientists in this period developed several techniques to infer past climate from fossil pollen, tree rings, pieces of vegetation, and other organic remains imprinted upon by former climates. Climate by Proxy examines how these techniques helped shape notions of climate itself.

Charenko also shows how these varied interpretations of climate played an outsized role in explanations of human history and destiny. Geologists, botanists, ecologists, and other scientists interested in climate over long timescales routinely discussed how climate influenced plants, animals, and, notably, people. By following the scientists who reconstructed climate using the natural archives, Climate by Proxy demonstrates how material objects worked with scientists' perceptions of human groups to compel, constrain, and reinforce their understandings of climate, history, and the future.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction
Chapter 1. Making Climate Dynamic in the Human Period: Plant Macrofossils and Geoarchaeological Evidence
Chapter 2. Climate as a Driver of Human History: Pollen and Tree Rings
Chapter 3. Prediction or Prophecy During the Dust Bowl? Pollen and Tree Rings
Chapter 4. Narrating the Pleistocene Extinctions: Sloth Dung and Packrat Middens
Chapter 5. Looking Forward When the Future Is Unprecedented: Analogs
Conclusion: Proxy Work Today: A Complex Whole

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Melissa Charenko is assistant professor in history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania.