Study Reconstructs Millennium of Australian Climate.
A team of researchers under Climate History Network member Joëlle Gergis has published a new article in the Journal of Climate that uses data from tree rings, ice cores, coral and 24 other natural indicators to reconstruct a millennium of Australian climatic history. The study, the Australasian region’s contribution to the fifth IPCC assessment report, collects and synthesizes the work of more than 30 scholars, conducted over many decades. Although plentiful records of past climatic fluctuations are available for the Northern Hemisphere over the past two millennia, the limited availability of long proxy records for the Southern Hemisphere has undermined attempts at global reconstructions. More . . .
New Member Blog Article: “Real Time Climate Change: Farm Diaries and Phenology in Prince Edward Island.”
By Joshua MacFadyen. Originally posted on ActiveHistory.ca.
It is 24 April, and although some Canadians have been mowing grass for weeks the spring plants on Prince Edward Island are only beginning to overcome the cold nights and occasional flurries that visit this island in April. Still, this is an early spring by historical accounts. On this day in 1879, John MacEachern recorded the following diary entry in Rice Point:
“Ice drifting out of Harbour and Nine Mile Creek, boats can get to Town now, a Ltr [boat] from East Point [arrived] back at Governors Island Tuesday.” More . . .
New Facebook Page for CHN
Please visit our new Climate History Network Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/climatehistorynetwork for more news and links. (And thanks to Dagomar and Eleonora for putting this together!)
CFP: European Society for Environmental History 2013
The ESEH has announced its call for papers for the 20-24 August 2013 biennial conference to be held in Munich and hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. The call for papers is online and will be open between 15 May and 15 September 2012. For more information, visit the ESEH website here.
New Website: The “Environment and Society Portal”
The Environment and Society Portal is a non-profit education and research project created by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, jointly initiated by the LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum. It aims to provide open access to environmental humanities materials and targets an academic audience as well as the interested public. The page architects expressly encourage users’ contributions to the portal “to cultivate the spirit of exploration and serendipity that characterizes research.” For starters, three interactive navigation tools, the map viewer, the timeline tool and the keyword explorer will guide you through “a small but fascinating selection of digital multimedia and interpretive features.” Enjoy!
New Member Blog Article: “Cheering for Global Warming: what Europe’s climatic past can tell us about our attitudes today.”
By Dagomar Degroot. Originally posted on ActiveHistory.ca.
Last March 15,000 heat records were shattered across all American states. While monthly temperatures soared over 15 degrees Celsius above twentieth century American averages, unseasonal warmth also affected much of Canada. In Toronto, hushed, apologetic admissions that there might be something to climate change after all quickly yielded to unabashed celebration of global warming as spring sprung a month early. Of course, if a similar heat wave settled over the city in July or August a very different – if equally shrill – chorus might have drowned my Twitter or Facebook feeds. Still, much of the Northern Hemisphere is uncomfortably cold more often than it’s uncomfortably warm. A month ago I couldn’t help but think that individual, corporate and state responses to climate change in the west might be more serious if the world was cooling. More . . .
New Member Publication: “A Case for a Climate History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”
The winter 2012 edition of Zeithistorische Forschungen (Contemporary History) includes a new article by CHN member Franz Mauelshagen, “„Anthropozän“: Plädoyer für eine Klimageschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” also available in English translation.
New Member Publication: “Climate, Human Population and Human Survival – What the Deep Past Tells Us about the Future”
The May 2012 issue of Origins (an online journal of the Ohio State University history department) is dedicated to climate and history, with an article by CHN member John Brooke entitled “Climate, Human Population and Human Survival: What the Deep Past Tells Us about the Future.”
Workshop Report: International Expert Group on Earth System Preservation (IESP) 3/28-30/2012
The International Expert Group on Earth System Preservation (IESP) held its second meeting on March 28 to 30, 2012. A group of 47 scientists, representatives from regulatory agencies, NGOs, businesses and from the media assembled in Wildbad-Kreuth, Germany, to explore whether and to what extent the resilience theory is applicable to sustainable development in general and in particular to finding solutions to tackle global warming, resource limitation, loss of biodiversity and human well being. An executive summary is available in PDF here<IESP conf rep>.
New Study Links Aerosols to Atlantic Temperature Shifts
A study published this week in Nature suggests that changing anthropogenic aerosol emissions since the mid-20th century could largely account for shifts in Atlantic Ocean sea surface temperature known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. If correct, the research implicates human aerosol emissions (in addition to greenhouse gas emissions) in some significant modern climate events and accompanying weather extremes, possibly including hurricanes and droughts in the Sahel. (As with all other posted stories, the original citation has been added to the Network’s Zotero Bibliographical Database.)
