Waters of the World

by Sarah Dry

  26 On what the ice core revealed, see Willi Dansgaard, S. J. Johnsen, and C. C. Langway Jr., “One Thousand Centuries of Climatic Record from Camp Century on the Greenland Ice Sheet,” Science 166, no. 3903 (1969): 377–380; and Richard Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  27 Dansgaard, Johnsen, and Langway, “One Thousand Centuries,” 377–380.

  28 On the history of paleoclimatology, see chapter 8 in Woodward, The Ice Ages; H. Le Treut, R. Somerville, U. Cubasch, Y. Ding, C. Mauritzen, A. Mokssit, T. Peterson, and M. Prather, “Historical Overview of Climate Change,” in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. S. Solomon, D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K. B. Averyt, M. Tignor, and H. L. Miller (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Chris Caseldine, “Conceptions of Time in (Paleo)Climate Science and Some Implications,” WIREs Climate Change 3 (2012): 329–338; R. W. Fairbridge, “History of Paleoclimatology,” in Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology and Ancient Environments, ed. V. Gornitz (New York: Springer, 2009), 414–428; and Matthias Dörries, “Politics, Geological Past, and the Future of Earth,” Historical Social Research 40, no. 2 (2015): 22–36.

  29 Dansgaard, Johnsen, and Langway, “One Thousand Centuries,” 380.

  30 Spencer Weart, “The Rise of Interdisciplinary Climate Science,” PNAS 110 (2013): 3658.

  31 Wallace Broecker, “Absolute Dating and the Astronomical Theory of Glaciation,” Science 151 (1966): 299–304.

  32 Wallace Broecker, “The Carbon Cycle and Climate Change: Memoirs of My 60 Years in Science,” Geochemical Perspectives 1 (2012): 276–277; Wallace Broecker, “When Climate Change Predictions Are Right for the Wrong Reasons,” Climatic Change 142 (2017): 1–6; and Wallace Broecker, The Great Ocean Conveyor: Discovering the Trigger for Abrupt Climate Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 19–25.

  33 From George Kukla, R. K. Matthews, and J. M. Mitchell, “The End of the Present Interglacial,” Quaternary Research 2, no. 3 (1972): 261–269.

  34 For the role played by Soviet climate scientists in the debate over the use of analogues, see Jonathan Oldfield, “Imagining Climates Past, Present and Future: Soviet Contributions to the Science of Anthropogenic Climate Change, 1953–1991,” Journal of Historical Geography 60 (2018): 41–51.

  35 Barry Saltzman, Dynamical Paleoclimatology: Generalized Theory of Global Climate Change (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2002).

  36 Alley, Two-Mile Time Machine, 21; and J. Jouzel, “A Brief History of Ice Core Science Over the Last 50 Years,” Climate of the Past Discussions 9 (3 July 2013): 3711–3767.

  37 Author interview, 10 April 2015.

  38 More recently, some have suggested other mechanisms to account for the D-O events, such as sea ice feedbacks or tropical processes, and Carl Wunsch has raised the possibility that they represent local or regional changes caused by windfield shifts owing to interaction with the ice sheet, rather than global change. Amy Clement and Larry Peterson, “Mechanisms of Abrupt Global Change of the Last Glacial Period,” Reviews of Geophysics 46 (2008): 1–39; and Carl Wunsch, “Abrupt Climate Change: An Alternative View,” Quaternary Research 65 (2006): 191–203.

  39 Global Change: Impacts on Habitability: A Scientific Basis for Assessment: A Report by the Executive Committee of a Workshop held at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, June 21–26, 1982, submitted on behalf of the executive committee on 7 July 1982 by Richard Goody (Chairman), NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab. See also Earth Observations from Space: History, Promise, and Reality (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1995).

  40 Global Change, 3–4.

  41 Toward an Understanding of Global Change: Initial Priorities for US Contributions to the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1988), v.

  42 Earth System Science: A Closer View, Report of the Earth System Sciences Committee, NASA Advisory Council (Washington, DC: NASA, 1988), 12.

  43 The diagram has come to be known as the Bretherton diagram but was developed by Berrien Moore, a future chair of IGBP, according to Sybil Seitzinger et al., “International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and Earth System Science: Three Decades of Co-Evolution,” Anthropocene 12 (December 2015): 3–16. Quote from Moore in “Berrien Moore, Earth System Science at 20,” Oral History Project, Edited Oral History Transcript, Berrien Moore III, interviewed by Rebecca Wright, National Weather Center, Norman, OK, 4 April 2011.

  44 Earth System Science, 19.

  45 Gregory Good, “The Assembly of Geophysics: Scientific Disciplines as Frameworks of Consensus,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 31, no. 3 (2000): 259–292.

  46 Sybil P. Seitzinger, Owen Gaffney, Guy Brasseur, Wendy Broadgate, Phillipe Ciais, Martin Claussen, Jan Willem Erisman, Thorsten Kiefer, Christiane Lancelot, Paul S. Monks, Karen Smyth, James Syvitski, and Mitsuo Uematsu, “International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme and Earth System Science: Three Decades of Co-Evolution,” Anthropocene 12 (2015): 3–16.

  47 Earth System Science, 1.

  48 Earth System Science, 5.

  49 Earth System Science, 15 and 10.

  CHAPTER 8

  1 Juergen Wiechselgartner and Roger Kasperson, “Barriers in the Science-Policy-Practice Interface: Toward a Knowledge-Action-System in Global Environmental Change Research,” Global Environmental Change 20 (May 2010): 276.

  2 H. H. Lamb and M. J. Ingram, “Climate and History: Report on the International Conference on ‘Climate and History,’ Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, 8–14 July 1979,” Past & Present 88, no. 1 (1 August 1980): 137.

  3 T. M. L. Wigley, M. J. Ingram, and G. Farmer, eds., Climate and History: Studies in Past Climates and Their Impact on Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4.

  4 Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History, 4.

  5 Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History, 4.

  6 The origins of this term and group of specialists can be dated by the creation of a journal named Climate Dynamics in 1986.

  7 For the history of GFD, see George Veronis’s very useful informal history of the GFD program at http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=110017.

  8 In 1990, when the first IPCC report appeared, the spatial resolution (grid size) was around 500 square kilometers. The grid extends up into the atmosphere as well as horizontally across the earth. Because the atmosphere is so thin compared to the surface area of the planet, it is sliced even more thinly—usually into increments of one kilometer. By 1996, that number had halved, to 250 kilometers. By 2001, it was down to 180 kilometers, and in 2007 it stood at 110.

  9 https://eo.ucar.edu/staff/rrussell/climate/modeling/climate_model_resolution.html.

  10 Nadir Jeevanjee, “A Perspective on Climate Model Hierarchies,” Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems 9, no. 4 (August 2017): 1760.

  11 See, for example, David Ferreira, John Marshall, Paul O’Gorman, and Sara Seager, “Climate at High-Obliquity,” Icarus 243 (2014): 236–248.

  12 Nadir Jeevanjee, Pedram Hassanzadeh, Spencer Hill, and Aditi Sheshadri, “A Perspective on Climate Model Hierarchies,” Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems 9, no. 4 (2017): 1760–1771.

  13 Caitlin De Silvey, Simon Naylor, and Colin Sackett, eds., Anticipatory History (Axminster, Devon: Uniform Books, 2011).

  14 One example of this approach is Alessandro Antonello and Mark Carey, “Ice Cores and the Temporalities of the Global Environment,” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (2017): 181–203.

  15 See Mike Hulme, Suraje Dessai, Irene Lorenzoni, and Donald Nelson, “Unstable Climates: Exploring the Statistical and Social Constructions of ‘Normal’ Climate,” Geoforum 40 (2009): 197–206
.

  16 See, for example, Gisli Palsson, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Sverker Sörlin, John Marks, Bernard Avril, Carole Crumley, Heide Hackmann, Poul Holm, John Ingram, Alan Kirman, Mercedes Pardo Buendía, and Rifka Weehuizen, “Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene: Integrating the Social Sciences and Humanities in Global Environmental Change Research,” Environmental Science & Policy 28 (2013): 3–13.

  BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

  CHAPTER 1

  Classic studies of global images of Earth are Tim Ingold’s “Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism,” in K. Milton, ed., Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1993), 31–42; and Dennis Cosgrove’s “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84 (1994): 270–294. More recent treatments of the nature of global knowledge include Mike Hulme, “Problems with Making and Governing Global Kinds of Knowledge,” Global Environmental Change 20, no. 4 (2010): 558–564; the special issue on “Visualizing the Global Environmental: New Research Directions,” Geo 3, no. 2 (2016); Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Sebastian Grevsmühl, La Terre vue d’en haut: I’invention de l’environnement global (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2014).

  CHAPTER 2

  Of Tyndall’s many works, Glaciers of the Alps (London: Murray, 1860), Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion (London: Longmans, 1863), and The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers (London: King, 1872) are most germane to the topics covered in this chapter. Thanks to Roland Jackson’s recent biography The Ascent of John Tyndall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) and the Tyndall Correspondence Project, which has produced four of a planned nineteen-volume series (published by the University of Pittsburgh Press), it is now possible to dive into Tyndall’s private world more easily than ever before. To place Tyndall in his social and cultural context, see Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, eds., Victorian Scientific Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Bernard Lightman and Michael Reidy, eds., The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries (London: Routledge, 2014). The classic article on the relationship between mountaineering, heroism, and science is Bruce Hevly’s “The Heroic Science of Glacier Motion,” Osiris 11 (1996): 66–86. For a more recent discussion of the role of masculinity and mountaineering, see Michael Reidy, “Mountaineering, Masculinity, and the Male Body in Mid-Victorian Britain,” in Robert Nye and Erika Milam, eds., “Scientific Masculinities,” Osiris 30 (November 2015): 158–181.

  James Croll still awaits his biographer. He tells his own story in James Campbell Irons, Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll, with Memoir of His Life and Work (London: Edward Stanford, 1896). On the development of geology in the period, see Mott Greene, Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World (Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), as well as Martin Rudwick’s synthesis of his own extensive scholarship on the topic, Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). An excellent history of the idea of the ice ages is John Imbrie and Katherine Palmer Imbrie’s Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), as is Jamie Woodward’s The Ice Age: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  CHAPTER 3

  Charles Piazzi Smyth’s exuberant account of his attempt to prove the feasibility of mountaintop astronomy is titled Teneriffe, An Astronomer’s Experiment: Or, Specialities of a Residence above the Clouds (London: Lovell Reeve, 1858). To understand his pyramidological obsession, see also Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (London: Alexander Strahan, 1864), written before he and Jessie visited Egypt, and the three-volume Life and Work at the Great Pyramid (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1867) composed upon their return. H. A. Brück and M. T. Brück’s biography The Peripatetic Astronomer: The Life of Charles Piazzi Smyth (Bristol and Philadelphia: Adam Hilger, 1988) gives a good account of his life but frustratingly lacks footnotes. Katharine Anderson trenchantly analyzes Piazzi Smyth’s rainband spectroscopy and cloud photography as part of the visual culture of Victorian meteorology in her Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Larry Schaff places Piazzi Smyth’s work at the Great Pyramid and Tenerife in the context of the technical and aesthetic development of photography in a series of articles in History of Photography: “Charles Piazzi Smyth’s 1865 Conquest of the Great Pyramid,” vol. 3, no. 4 (1979): 331–354; “Piazzi Smyth at Tenerife: Part I, the Expedition and the Resulting Book,” vol. 4, no. 4 (1980): 289–307; “Piazzi Smyth at Tenerife: Part II, Photography and the Disciplines of Constable and Harding,” vol. 5, no. 1 (1981): 27–50. On Piazzi Smyth’s role in setting metrical standards, see Simon Schaffer, “Metrology, Metrication and Victorian Values,” in Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 438–474. Mapping the Spectrum: Techniques of Visual Representation in Research and Teaching (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), by Klaus Hentschel, explores the astonishing range of epistemological and practical challenges in representing the spectral array. The classic article on the Magnetic Crusade is John Cawood, “The Magnetic Crusade: Science and Politics in Early Victorian Britain,” Isis 70, no. 4 (1979): 492–518. Successive editions of the International Cloud Atlas from 1896 onward show the evolution of techniques for identifying and ordering cloud types.

  On Humboldt, see Andrea Wulf’s recent biography The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, Lost Hero of Science (New York: Knopf, 2015) and dip into the primary texts: Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804 by A. von Humboldt and A. Bonpland (London: Longman Hurst, 1814); and Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otte (New York: Harper, 1858).

  CHAPTER 4

  Richard Grove’s pioneering Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) provides important context for the relationship between imperial projects and changing understandings of the relations between humans and the environment. To understand the pedagogical system that shaped a young Gilbert Walker, see Andrew Warwick’s Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), which describes the intellectual and physical rigors of the life of a nineteenth-century Cambridge wrangler. Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002) tracks the imperial causes of successive famines in India. In El Niño and World History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Richard Grove and George Adamson consider El Niño from prehistory to the present.

  On the history of sunspots and solar physics, see Graeme Gooday, “Sunspots, Weather and the Unseen Universe: Balfour Stewart’s Anti-Materialist Representation of Energy,” in Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth Century Periodicals, ed. Sally Shuttleworth and Geoffrey Cantor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). Deborah Coen’s Climate in Motion: Science, Empire and the Problem of Scale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018) outlines the role of the Habsburg monarchy in ushering in a multiscalar science of climate.

  CHAPTER 5

  Robert Marc Friedman’s Appropriating the Weather: Wilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) tells the history of the Bergen school of meteorology, which combined empirical forecasting with dynamical physics to forge a new meteorology during and in the years immediately following World War I. Frederik Nebeker’s Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1995) describes the growth of meteorology from a broader perspective and ac
ross an entire century, including the impact of the computer and the rise of numerical meteorology in the post–World War II period. Kristine Harper’s Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008) describes a similar historical period with special insight into the contributions of operational meteorologists to the development of numerical weather prediction. Paul Edwards’s A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010) is a masterful analysis of the relations between data, models, and politics in the generation of climate science and provides an important frame for Joanne Simpson’s use of models and data in her own work.

  On weather control, see Kristine Harper, Make It Rain: State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), discusses the military uses of weather control, while James Fleming’s Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) is a warning to contemporary would-be geo-engineers of the perils of weather control.

  CHAPTER 6

  For an overview of the early history of oceanography, see Margaret Deacon, Scientists and the Sea, 1650–1900: A Study of Marine Science (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997). Helen Rozwadowski picks the story up in the mid-nineteenth century and places it in broader cultural context in her Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Eric Mills’s The Fluid Envelope of Our Planet: How the Study of Ocean Currents Became a Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009) presents the history of oceanography as a shift from a descriptive to a physical science, ending at pretty much the precise moment that Stommel entered the scene. Stommel’s lively autobiographical memoir is included in the hard-to-find Henry Stommel, Nelson Hogg, and Rui Xin Huang, Collected Works of Henry M. Stommel, 3 vols. (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1995), which contains all of his published and much of his unpublished work. More accessible are the numerous remembrances included in “Henry Stommel,” Oceanus 35 (Special Issue, 1992). For the impact of the Stommel diagram outside oceanography, see Tiffany Vance and Ronald Doel, “Graphical Methods and Cold War Scientific Practice: The Stommel Diagram’s Intriguing Journey from the Physical to the Biological Environmental Sciences,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40, no. 1 (2010): 1–47. Ocean Circulation and Climate: Observing and Modelling the Global Ocean, ed. Gerold Siedler, John Church, and John Gould (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2001), contains a comprehensive snapshot of the field in 2001, including a retrospective appraisal of MODE. Carl Wunsch’s Modern Observational Physical Oceanography: Understanding the Global Ocean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) demonstrates how observation lies at the heart of physical oceanography today and includes a history of how it came to be.