Archive for July 2012
Historical Climate at the American Geophysical Union Meeting
PAGES will be supporting the following session, of interest to historical climatologists, at the AGU in San Francisco this December:
Podcast on Historical Climatology
A new episode of the Exploring Environmental History podcast examines aspects of historical climatology. The guest on this episode of the Podcast is Dagomar Degroot, a PhD Candidate in environmental history at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research explores the issue of how the changing climate of the Little Ice Age influenced the cultural, military and economic histories of the Dutch Republic during the early modern period. Dagomar discusses some of the pitfalls of this type of research, the sources available to historian’s researching climate and the relevance to present day debates about global warming and climate change.
To listen to the podcast, go to the Environmental History Resources website at:
http://www.eh-resources.org/podcast/podcast.html#46
Follow the podcast on Twitter: @EH_Resources
CFP – Climate and Weather: Science as Public Culture
The Maison Française d’Oxford, in collaboration with the Museum of the History of Science, will host a conference in January 2013 on the history of climatological knowledge and public communication. Papers are invited to address the themes of “commodification of meteorological knowledge,” climate and media, and historicizing climate history.
Submissions should include a title and abstract of up to 300 words, and be sent to Thomas Le Roux (thomas.leroux@history.ox.ac.uk) by September 15, 2012. The program will be announced at the beginning of October 2012.
For more information, see the PDF here.
NCAR Climate Data Guide
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has launched a tool for searching and evaluating climate data sets. NCAR explains the Climate Data Guide as “the go-to source for scientifically sound information and advice on the strengths, limitations, and applications of climate data. Experts who construct, evaluate, and compare climate data sets contribute their perspectives and advice on climate data and analysis methods for a broad community of data users. Users may participate by posting comments, questions, and links.” For now, there are only a few datasets going back more than a century, so it has limited use for historians. However, the searchability and clear evaluations of data make it a valuable tool for non-specialists. (The link has been added to the “Databases and Projects” page.)
