Climate by proxy : a history of scientific reconstructions of the past and future / Melissa Charenko.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Charenko, Melissa, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Paleoclimatology.

Paleoweathering.

Climate and civilization.

Physical Description:

vii, 242 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Making climate dynamic in the human period : plant macrofossils and geoarchaeological evidence

Climate as a driver of human history : pollen and tree rings

Prediction or prophecy during the Dust Bowl? : pollen and tree rings

Narrating the Pleistocene extinctions : sloth dung and packrat middens

Looking forward when the future is unprecedented : analogs

Conclusion. Proxy work today : a complex whole.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-234) and index.

ISBN:

9780226844084

0226844080

9780226844107

0226844102

OCLC:

1502657627