{"id":37600,"date":"2018-09-11T06:03:20","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T11:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37600"},"modified":"2018-09-11T06:03:20","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T11:03:20","slug":"the-19th-century-tumult-over-climate-change-and-why-it-matters-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37600","title":{"rendered":"The 19th-Century Tumult Over Climate Change \u2013 And Why It Matters Today"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"field field-name-field-bimage field-type-image field-label-hidden\">\n<div class=\"field-items\">\n<div class=\"field-item even\">\n<h3 id=\"page-title\" class=\"page__title title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.desmogblog.com\/2018\/09\/10\/19th-century-tumult-over-climate-change-and-why-it-matters-today\">The 19th-Century Tumult Over Climate Change \u2013 And Why It Matters Today<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"new-horizontal-social-bar clearfix\">\n<div class=\"new-horizontal-share-wrapper new-horizontal-fb-wrapper clearfix\">Back in the 19th century, when tractors were still pulled by horses and the word \u201ccomputer\u201d meant a person hired to carry out tedious calculations, climate science made front-page\u00a0news.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden\">\n<div class=\"field-items\">\n<div class=\"field-item even\">\n<p>One European forester remarked in 1901 that few questions had \u201cbeen debated and addressed from so many sides and so relentlessly\u201d as that of the climatic effect of deforestation. Recalling this crowded, noisy and wide-ranging conflict \u2013 a \u201churly-burly\u201d over the \u201cclimate question,\u201d as the scientist <a href=\"https:\/\/www.springer.com\/us\/book\/9780792361282\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Eduard Br\u00fcckner<\/a> called it at the time \u2013 reminds us that climate science has not always been the elite, well-mannered pursuit that it is\u00a0today.<\/p>\n<p>Might this popular, participatory approach have been an advantage? Given <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/03\/22\/climate\/global-energy-demand.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the ongoing rise in global greenhouse gas emissions<\/a> five years after a <span class=\"caps\">U.N.<\/span> report found that humans are \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/science-environment-24292615\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the dominant cause<\/a>\u201d of global warming, it\u2019s a question worth\u00a0asking.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The science of climatology is\u00a0born<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As I write about in my <a href=\"https:\/\/press.uchicago.edu\/ucp\/books\/book\/chicago\/C\/bo24768042.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">book about the history of climate science<\/a> in the 19th century, the possibility that human actions might wreak havoc with the climate became a widespread concern for ordinary people across Europe, North Africa and the\u00a0Americas.<\/p>\n<p>Farmers knew intuitively that even a small change in baseline climate greatly increased the risk of extremes, and a single drought could ruin a farming community, even if followed by years of good weather. As one farmer in Central Europe put it in a letter to a local paper, you couldn\u2019t rightly grasp the import of climate change unless you were \u201cdependent on the yield of a few small plots of land,\u201d and until you had \u201ckept a lookout for a hearty rainfall day by day throughout the dry summer for several years, in vain\u2026You must have seen your favorite fruit trees mourning with wilting\u00a0leaves.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure class=\"align-center zoomable\"><a href=\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/234698\/original\/file-20180903-41720-kvlmh6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/234698\/original\/file-20180903-41720-kvlmh6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><figcaption><\/figcaption>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 19th-Century Tumult Over Climate Change \u2013 And Why It Matters Today Back in the 19th century, when tractors were still pulled by horses and the word \u201ccomputer\u201d meant a person hired to carry out tedious calculations, climate science made front-page\u00a0news. One European forester remarked in 1901 that few questions had \u201cbeen debated and addressed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[141,2956,8270,21599,5317],"class_list":["post-37600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-science","tag-climatology","tag-deborah-coen","tag-desmog-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37600"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37601,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37600\/revisions\/37601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}