Glaciers and Deserts: The Changing Climates of the Nineteenth Century

Saturday, January 4, 2014: 3:10 PM
Columbia Hall 5 (Washington Hilton)
Philipp N. Lehmann, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
In 1895, the German geographer Paul Reichard noted with exasperation that the “desiccation of Africa” was widely reported as an incontrovertible fact. While he certainly overstated his argument, Reichard had a valid point: there was, in fact, a lively discussion among 19th-century geographers and geologists about past, present, and future climate changes.

This paper examines the factors for the rise of scholarly interest in climatic changes in nineteenth-century Europe. It traces the connection between the widespread acceptance of the Glacial Theory, the rise of academic geography, European Sahara expeditions, and colonial development in North Africa. The debate over changing climates was also connected to political and technological concerns, or the aspirations of correcting “nature’s wrongs,” as one German geographer put it in 1888. Climate change theories did not remain in the academic realm for long, but soon found their way into large-scale engineering plans of environmental transformation, or man-made climate alteration.

I seek not only to demonstrate how and why climate change became a viable and attractive topic of discussion in the nineteenth century, but also to show that apprehensions over large-scale environmental change have been a common and important part of the European intellectual landscape long before the second half of the twentieth century and our current concerns over global warming.

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