This intriguing volume provides a thorough examination of the historical roots of global climate change as a field of inquiry, from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. Based on primary and archival sources, the book is filled with interesting perspectives on what people have understood, experienced, and feared about the climate and its changes in the past. Chapters explore climate and culture in Enlightenment thought; climate debates in early America; the development of international networks of observation; the scientific transformation of climate discourse; and early contributions to understanding terrestrial temperature changes, infrared radiation, and the carbon dioxide theory of climate. But perhaps most important, this book shows what a study of the past has to offer the interdisciplinary investigation of current environmental problems.
James Rodger Fleming is a historian of science and professor of science, technology and society at Colby College. He earned degrees in astronomy (B.S., Penn State), atmospheric science (M.S. Colorado State), and history (M.A. and Ph.D. Princeton) and worked in atmospheric modeling, airborne observational programs, and as historian of the American Meteorological Society. Professor Fleming has held major fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His book, Fixing the Sky (Columbia University Pres, 2010, paperback 2012) received the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology and the Louis J. Battan Author's Award from the American Meteorological Society.
Jim has been a visiting scholar at MIT, Harvard University, Penn State, the National Air and Space Museum, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Awards and honors include election as a Fellow of the AAAS "for pioneering studies on the history of meteorology and climate change and for the advancement of historical work within meteorological societies," election as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, participation as a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, appointment to the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History by the Smithsonian Institution and the Roger Revelle Fellowship in Global Stewardship by the AAAS, and a number of named scholarships and lectureships including the Steinbach at Woods Hole, the Ritter at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Beinecke at Yale, the Vetelsen at the University of Rhode Island, and the Gordon Manly Lectureship of the Royal Meteorological Society.
Jim is a resident of China, Maine (not Mainland China!) He enjoys fishing, good jazz, good BBQ, seeing students flourish, building the community of historians of the geosciences, and connecting the history of science and technology with public policy. "Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else."
