by Sarah Dry
CHAPTER 7
Willi Dansgaard’s lively and funny memoir Frozen Annals: Greenland Ice Cap Research (Odder, Denmark: Narayana Press, 2004) paints a vivid picture of the intellectual and practical adventures of the early expeditions to drill ice cores in Greenland. See Ronald Doel, Kristine Harper, and Matthias Heymann’s edited volume Exploring Greenland: Cold War Science and Technology on Ice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Janet Martin-Nielsen’s Eismitte in the Scientific Imagination: Knowledge and Politics at the Center of Greenland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) for a good grounding in the strategic importance of Greenland during the Cold War, the importance of geophysics to military defense work in the period, and the part played by a small country, Denmark, in a story normally dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union. Richard Alley’s The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) provides an account of ice-core research in Greenland beginning in the 1990s, picking up roughly where Dansgaard’s account ends. Wallace Broecker’s The Great Ocean Conveyor: Discovering the Trigger for Abrupt Climate Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) provides a firsthand account of the role played by paleoclimatological data, including ice cores, in understanding global change. The definitive account of the discovery of global warming remains Spencer Weart’s eponymous text (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, 2nd ed.). For a useful summary of the transition from climatology to climate science, see Matthias Heymann and Dania Achermann, “From Climatology to Climate Science in the Twentieth Century,” in S. White, C. Pfister, and F. Mauelshagen, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 605–632. Joshua Howe’s Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014) is a politically nuanced history. Earth System Science: A Closer View (Washington, DC: NASA, 1988) is a fascinating window onto the birth of the discipline.
CHAPTER 8
For a convincing demonstration of how geologists established a historical dimension for nature, see Martin Rudwick’s trilogy of books: Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). On the relationship between history and climate, there is a small but growing set of theoretical interventions. See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222; Fabien Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, “Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 579–598; and Andreas Malm, “Who Lit This Fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 215–248. The concept of the Anthropocene has catalyzed debate on the historical nature of anthropogenic climate change since Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer coined the term in “The ‘Anthropocene,’” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. A more recent critical history of the concept is Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016).