ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Making Global Temperature Across Land, Ice and Oceans

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

When and why did temperature become the key climatic index? This session brings together contributions to a collaborative book in which we have explored this question from James Cook’s voyage to the southern oceans in the 1770s to the first IPCC report in 1990, and shows that climate was always plural and for most of this period, temperature too was a contested index. Highlighting that index and exploring how and why diverse empirical measures and a range of different proxies were deployed in a variety of pursuits—from commercial shipping through natural history inquiry and geological arguments about ice ages—proves a way of exploring signficant contingencies shaping which protocols and proxies counted for whom in determining perspectives on climate across temporal scales ranging from days to thousands, even a million years. It also highlights the very different kinds of arguments that have asserted forms of globality across colonial territories, major landmasses, the world’s oceans, and northern and southern hemispheres amongst different communities (disciplinary, commercial, national) in different places and periods. Our account pays particular attention to the plurality of voices to which we must attend in order to understand both the limits of measurement and the paradoxes of representation implicit in the way that the instrumental record of temperature in the height of imperialist world-making from 1850 to 1900 has come to serve as the ‘pre-industrial baseline’ for our accounts of just how much climate has changed.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Tom Simpson, University of Warwick

Individual Presentations

• Making Oceanic Climate - Sam Robinson, York

• Freezing Temperature: Ice as an Instrument and Proxy in Climate Science - Alexis Rider, The University of Vienna

• Picking Proxies in the Making of Global Climate Histories - Richard Staley

Session Organizer

• Richard Staley