In my Master’s thesis I snootily described ecosystems as “contingent hybridities of
elaborate interdependencies subject to chaotic combinatorics,” which may or may not describe
wicked systems well, but the phonetic acrobatics required to pronounce the phrase definitely
captures the complexity of eco- and other systems. This includes the wicked system of human
affairs to which the discipline of history tends with its attendant social, economic, political,
cultural, psychological, and other factors. Climate History, as an interdisciplinary endeavor,
seeks to discover causal relationships between two titular wicked systems — something a
quantum computer will cry about in front of its therapist a hundred years from now — so in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, it was, naturally, a slog.
And yet they were animated by lofty and exigent motives. I can scarcely think of a
research subject corralling such vast swathes of experts across STEM and humanistic disciplines
behind a celestially rare conjunction of evidence, in which glaciological or palynological data is
presented in an historical analysis or a time-series analysis of foodstuff price fluctuations from a
monastic archive is presented at a UN conference on climatology. In this twilit zone in the 1970s
and 80s, climatologists and historians were mining the same data sources for the same ends.
Cliometrics really beefed up history’s social-scientific bonafides. It also clues us in the present in
to a socially constructed understanding of this period of climate history, in which quantitative
analysis was in vogue in history and there was as much talk of, and more palpable excitement
about, model calibration, regression, and refactorization as documentary historiography.
Much of the reading this week demonstrates that trend. In Ingram, et al’s “Past climates
and their impact on Man: a review,” historical documents are mentioned only smushed between “various types of proxy data (glacial evidence, pollen, tree rings, stable isotopes and
archaeological data)” and “meteorological instruments” in their methodology overview.{1}
I barely recognize de Vries as an historian when he says things like “Through regression analysis,
supplemented by comparisons of means, we can theoretically identify the quantitative
dimensions of societal responses to climatic fluctuations,” before going on to clarify that by
“theoretically” he meant “not actually” when he said that “[i]t became clear that no worthwhile
results were to be achieved in the absence of a well-specified model of causation, and such
models required more refined meteorological data than provided by the average winter
temperature series [in 17th and 18th c. Netherlands].” {2}
In short, in Northern Europe in the modern period, only a couple hundred years in the past, with a large amount of meteorological data relative to other places and times, quantitative analysis is not possible. He concludes with the sentiment that “there is little hope” and that “the data do not suffice,” “not even in the twentieth century” for quantitative time-series analyses.”{3} Meteorological data is out and the other techniques also present problems for these historians.
When it comes to chronology, documentary evidence and what climate historians term
“proxy data” (radiological, glaciological, palynological, stratigraphic, etc.) together form a kind
of Venn diagram incapable of filling in the overlapping portion between the circles. Proxy data
gives very accurate and frequency-consistent results about temperature, precipitation, and
gaseous content in the atmosphere or water within its data range, but that date range cannot be
confidently dated within absolute chronology beyond a resolution of about +/- 25 years.
Documentary evidence, on the other hand, can be absolutely dated highly precisely often to the day of the month of the year, but provides erratic, possibly inaccurate, and rarely numerical
descriptions of meteorological fact. One would think these two evidentiary bases could be
deployed in concert to fill in the Venn diagram overlap, but David Herlihy warns against this
delusional conflation of what is inverse for what is complementary, noting “the risk of false
associations is consequently present, which may offer specious conformation to mistaken
judgments.”{4}
The authors here seem to all have the same lightbulb going off above their heads. What
do we do to ascertain causal relationships between not one, but two wicked phenomena, when
none of the normal methodological approaches suffice? David Hackett Fischer attempts a
solution that is worth reproducing in full. Its discomfiting grandiosity feels appropriate to the
discomfiting expanse of the squall line between two wicked systems that is Climate History:
The world’s climate has been always in motion, never at rest. Climate change was always
present in the past — but in many different forms. A descriptive history of climate might
be conceived primarily in terms of the changing rhythms of climatic change itself. To
organize our understanding of that aspect of the subject, we must study not merely the
first but also the second derivative of change — the rate of change in rates of change —
‘deep change’ in processes of change themselves.{5}
For Fischer, we must return to the essential determinant in history: temporality. Almost
tautologically, he reminds us, history is, at its ontological core, an assemblage of “temporal
generalizations that gives pattern and meaning to the past” through periodization.{6}
He then touches upon, as many of these authors do, the inherent coproductivity between climate and
society (though not in such terms) — climate affects us; we affect it, simultaneously. We, are,
apparently, to meet phenomenological complexity with methodological complexity. I look
forward to seeing this play out in the subsequent forty years since.
{1} M. L. Wigley, M. J. Ingram, G. Farmer, “Introduction” in their Climate and History: Studies in Past
Climates and Their Impact on Man (Cambridge, 1981), 3.
{2} Jan de Vries, “Measuring the Impact of Climate on History: The Search for Appropriate Methodologies,” in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10:4 Special Issue: History and Climate: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Spring, 1980), eds. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, 603-605.
{3} De Vries, 624.
{4} David Herlihy, “Climate and Documentary Sources: A Comment,” in Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 10:4 Special Issue: History and Climate: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Spring, 1980), eds.
Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, 714.
{5} David Hackett Fischer, “Climate and History: Priorities for Research,” in Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 10:4 Special Issue: History and Climate: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Spring, 1980), eds.
Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, 823.
{6} Fischer, 824.
—–
- World Meteorological Organization – Proceedings of the World Climate Conference: A Conference of Experts on Climate and Mankind
- Foreward
- Vii – “This publication may safely be considered as the most profound and comprehensive review of climate and of climate in relation to mankind yet published.”
- Robert M. White (Chairman) – Climate at the Millennium
- 3 – “The issues we will address during the next two weeks are as old as mankind and as new as our interdependent social and economic systems.”
- “One may ask, ‘Why a World Climate Conference now?’ The timing of our meeting is a response to several concerns. The First is the worldwide reaction to the climatic events that have so disrupted human society over the past decade. The second arises from a growing appreciation that not only is humanity vulnerable to variations in climate, but climate is also vulnerable to the acts of humanity. The third is a perception of a broader climatic vulnerability stemming from world population growth, increased world demand for food, energy, and other resources, increased interdependence of nations, and the pace of economic development. It is a vulnerability that can only increase because the underlying causes will intensify, not diminish.”
- 4 – “In recent years, we have come to appreciate that the activities of humanity can and do affect climate. We now change the radiative processes of the atmosphere and perhaps its circulation by emission of the products of our industrial and agricultural society. We now change the boundary processes between earth and atmosphere by our use of the land.”
- 5 – Climate as a resource
- 6 – “One important new concept that arises from the material prepared for this Conference is that we should begin to think of climate as a resource.”
- “A climate change could be the cause of a major redistribution of wealth, and from the point of view of mankind, quite an arbitrary one.”
- 7 – “The United Nations Conference on Environment in 1972 in Stockholm was the first occasion on which the world confronted common problems of global concern whose solution could be achieved only by the closest collaboration among nations.”
- “The challenge to our science is unprecedented. Indeed, it is a challenge to all of science because the problems we must confront are not strictly meteorological . . ..” [examples of transdisciplinarity]
- “We need to be not only atmospheric scientists but geologists and oceanographers and geophysicists. And we need those who are expert in the fields of agriculture, land use, energy, and water resources, those who are knowledgeable about health and fisheries and marine transport, and economists, geographers and sociologists to assist us in the documentation of the nature of climatic impacts. And because climate is a global problem, it is so important that representation comes from all over the world, from countries with different economic and social systems.”
- 9 – “The third stream . . . the impacts of climate variability and change upon society. We all appreciate the direct effects of drought upon crops, or cold winters upon energy demand. What we do not understand clearly, and what governments are concerned about, it the question of the integrated impact of climatic change and variability upon society. . . . We wish to learn how the chain of interactions that may ultimately result in malnutrition or unemployment or other critical situations is dependent upon climate. Why are some social and economic structures more resilient to climatic events than others? Do these differences depend on factors we can do something about? If so, what can be done about them?”
- 10 – “Ultimately, what we do about climate issues depends upon the state of our scientific knowledge. Only to the extent that we have understanding can we help our governments.”
- “Mere assertions that the socio-economic impacts of climate will be severe will not be accepted by governments confronted with many urgent requests for resources for programmes all directed at improving socio-economic conditions. It is incumbent upon us not just to assert, but to make the case for international investments in climate research and services.”
- “If this Conference can allay rather than raise fears, it will have achieved much. If, on the other hand, we find it necessary to alert the world to the need for international action, we cannot shirk that responsibility. Our charge is clear, our responsibility great, our task complex.”
- Reid A. Bryson and Christine Padoch – “On the Climates of History” – Journal of Interdisciplinary History
- 583 – “. . . changes in community composition will result from shifts in relative competitive advantage when environmental factors change. In the human context, this principle suggests that the physical environment, and particularly the climate, gives a biad to the direction and success of the near-infinite series of decisions that make up the course of history.”
- 585 – pollen test of lake core sample revealed no drought — reexamination revealed that lake had completely dried up and there was no pollen evidence because no pollen had been preserved in that stratum — “The ‘times of troubles’ have more fragmentary records than stable times.”
- 586 – “The resolution of these problems requires objective, quantitative data on climate which are independent of historical data.”
- Where is there room for folk, traditional, or oral knowledge of climate?
- 587 – “. . . climatic quasi-discontinuities”
- 588 – “A prime use of climatic data in historical analysis is to assess the degree of stress on the economic base of the people being studied . . .”
- 590 – what exactly is this table depicting — what is this cliometric bullshit
- 591 – “Summing up the studies mentioned above and many more, we may construct a tentative global sequence of climatic episodes, rather similar to the geological framework of epochs separated by significant changes of ‘revolutions’.”
- Jan de Vries – “Measuring the Impact of Climate on History: The Search for Appropriate Methodologies – Journal of Interdisciplinary History
- 599 – the idea that non-human history could shape human history was until recently unthinkable and now becoming popular?
- 600 – proxy data: series of cherry tree blossomings in japan
- 603 – “Unless these crises can be shown to be something other than unique, exogenous shocks, a skeptic might feel justified in concluding that short-term climatic crises stand in relation to economic history as bank robberies to the history of banking.”
- “An alternative to the case study approach is to apply time-series analysis to the study of meteorological, economic, and other societal variables. Through regression analysis, supplemented by comparisons of means, we can theoretically identify the quantitative dimensions of societal responses to climatic fluctuations.”
- [Summary so far … here’s why the relationship between climate and human history is complicated… here are some methods that have been used to make inferences about that relationship… here’s why they’re wrong … here’s a better method …. Oh it just so happens to be the method I used in this one study I did]
- 624 – “Since few economic historians care to challenge the historical existence of climatic change, per se, the fate of climate change as a significant variable in historical studies hinges on the successful development of a means of measuring its influence. It might be fair to say that historians are psychologically ready, even eager, for the rise of climatic change as a vehicle of long-term historical explanation, but do not possess the means of distinguishing its impact from among the many other variables at work on human society.”
- “In practice, there is little hope of performing such [quantitative time series] analyses. The data do not suffice for such approaches, probably not even in the twentieth century. But, the problem is not simply one of data; a more fundamental weakness of such approaches is the static concept of human society that they reflect.”
- Foreward
-
- David Herlihy – “Climate and Documentary Sources: A Comment”
- 713 – two data requirements for historical climate data: 1) series must be accurately placed in time; 2) datapoints within series must be consistent and mathematically comparable.
- Field data is consistent, comparable, and mathematizable, but difficult to locate in time accurately, tree rings, ice cores, stratigraphy, radiological dating, are only datable to a range of about 50 years
- Documentary data is the opposite. We know the date in time but it’s not internally consistent and comparable enough to be mathematizable.
- 714 – Can’t these two complementary defects offset one another? — NO
- “A risk of false associations is consequently present, which may offer specious conformation to mistaken judgments.”
- Two types of documentary evidence: 1) direct observation of meteorological events; 2) description of weather-related indirect phenomena such as harvests, food prices, etc. (proxy data)
- 715 – “And yet this almanac of observations has value, preeminently for two reasons. It is useful to know the extreme conditions and dramatic events which prevailed or happened in the past, impressed contemporaries, and thus became part of recorded history. And for historians at least, it is valuable to have a chronicle of human perceptions of and reactions to weather; attitudes toward the natural world form a principal part of the collective mentality and culture of historical societies.”
- David Hackett Fischer – “Climate and History: Priorities for Research”
- 821 – “historical climatology . . . which reconstructs the record of climate from written materials such as the Norse sagas in Scandinavia, and prayers for rain in Spain, which have been converted into an index of precipitation on the infidel assumption that the more people prayed, the less it rained.”
- “In my judgment, top priority should go to primary research which is directly designed to promote the power of synthesis in climatological history. . . . What is most urgently needed today is a synthesizing venture, conceived on the broadest practicable scale, which might put some of the pieces together in a coherent way.”
- 823 – “It might be said that knowledge advances by an alternating course of analysis and synthesis. . . . It is a time for synthesis on several different levels: first in the history of climate itself, and then in the study of climate and culture.”
- “The world’s climate has been always in motion, never at rest. Climate change was always present in the past — but in many different forms. A descriptive history of climate might be conceived primarily in terms of the changing rhythms of climatic change itself. To organize our understanding of that aspect of the subject, we must study not merely the first but also the second derivative of change — the rate of change in rates of change — ‘deep change’ in processes of change themselves.”
- 823-24 – “Periodization is not merely an academic game that historians play. It is the way in which they organize temporal generalizations that gives pattern and meaning to the past.”
- 826 – “If this hypothesis is correct, then the history of climate and culture may be understood as a developing series of conjunctive relationships of great complexity. Within each of those contexts, human beings existed not as mindless automatons — not merely as objects, but also as agents who adapted to environmental conditions and altered them as well, not always as they had intended.”
- 826-27 – “In each conjunctive relationship, climate change (caused in part by human acts) created certain challenges in moments which might be called crises of adaptation. We might expect those moments to have occurred when rates of climatic change were unusually rapid, which the magnitude of change was unusually great, when deviations from normal conditions were most prolonged, or when the rhythm of climatic change was most variable and unstable, and one discontinuity was followed so quickly by another that an adaptation to one climatic movement may have exacerbated the effect of the next. Of those many sorts of challenges — changes in the rate, magnitude, duration, and variability of climatic change — perhaps climatic variability (itself conceived as a variable in time) may have been the most important.”
- David Herlihy – “Climate and Documentary Sources: A Comment”
-
- Theodore K. Rabb – “The Historian and the Climatologist”
- 831 – “Once the wonder [of climatological backdating through palynology, stratigraphy, glaciology, etc.] has passed, however, the historian is faced with the same dilemma that arises in the wake of research of . . . recently developed specialties: how does it all relate to the findings of traditional history? In other words, how is one to integrate the new revelations with the familiar political, economic, and social landmarks that historians have painstakingly erected since the generation of Leopold von Ranke?”
- [THE RARE CONJUNCTION OF SCIENTIFIC AND HUMANISTIC CONCERNS: RETROACTIVE RECREATION OF HISTORICAL CLIMATE USEFUL FOR BOTH CLIMATOLOGY AND HISTORY THE EVIDENTIARY BASIS UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE CHANGE BOTH SCIENTIFICALLY AND HISTORIOGRAPHICALLY IS ONE AND THE SAME DATA]
- 834 – “Historians want to know if climate ‘made a difference,’ and climatologists equally need to discover which of the many phenomena they study have had the largest consequences”
- 837 – Climate is neither deterministic nor insignificant in human affairs. Human activity is neither deterministic nor insignificant to climatic reality.
- Theodore K. Rabb – “The Historian and the Climatologist”
- M.J. Ingram, G. Farmer, and T.M.L. Wigley – “Introduction: Past climates and their impact on Man: a review” in Climate and History: Studies in Past Climates and Their Impact on Man (Cambridge, 1981)
- 3 – “The study of the interactions between climate and history embraces a number of distinct aspects: climate reconstruction; the identification and measurement of the impact of climate on past societies; the adaptation of societies to climatic stress; and human perceptions of climate and climatic change.”
- 5 – “Moreover, the question of the past impact of climate is of interest to other disciplines. Many of the environmental scientists engaged in climatic reconstruction are not motivated simply by a spirit of scientific inquiry, but are deeply committed to Man’s welfare and believe that their research can be of practical benefit. One of the possible applications of an improved understanding of the climates of the past and of the present is to predict the likely range of climatic variation in the future.”
- William Kellogg and Robert Schware, Foreward and “Overview” from Climate Change and Society (Westview, 1981)
