Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale

Climate in Motion

Climate in Motion

SCIENCE, EMPIRE, AND THE PROBLEM OF SCALE

Deborah R. Coen

The University of Chicago Press    Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39882-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55502-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Coen, Deborah R., author.

Title: Climate in motion : science, empire, and the problem of scale / Deborah R. Coen.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017054497 | ISBN 9780226398822 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226555027 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Climatology—Research—Austria. | Climatology—History—19th century. | Science—Austria—History—19th century. | Science—Political aspects—Austria. | Austria—Intellectual life—19th century.

Classification: LCC QC857.A92 C64 2018 | DDC 551.509—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054497

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Amalia and Adam, and in memory of my sister Gwendolyn Basinger (1965–2017)

A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. . . . In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.

Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

There is no affair that a priori and according to general principles could be called large or small; matters are only large or small in comparison to and in relation to other things.

Attributed to Emperor Francis I of Austria

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Climate and Empire

PART 1  Unity in Diversity

1  The Habsburgs and the Collection of Nature

2  The Austrian Idea

3  The Imperial-Royal Scientist

4  The Dual Task

PART 2  The Scales of Empire

5  The Face of the Empire

6  The Invention of Climatography

7  The Power of Local Differences

8  Planetary Disturbances

PART 3  The Work of Scaling

9  The Forest-Climate Question

10  The Floral Archive

11  Landscapes of Desire

Conclusion: After Empire

Gallery

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

PLATES

INTRODUCTION

Climate and Empire

In 1869, at the age of thirty, Julius Hann seemed poised for a brilliant academic career. Holding two degrees in physics from the University of Vienna, Hann had earned an international reputation three years earlier by explaining the cause of a mysterious wind. Foehn blows warm and dry on the northern side of the Alps, resembling what those living east of the Rockies call chinook. In the Alps it strikes most often in the cold months, producing incongruously warm temperatures and allegedly unleashing a variety of human woes, from heart conditions to epileptic seizures. In Hann’s day, because of foehn’s warmth and dryness, it was assumed to originate in the Sahara. Indeed, it was common at the time to ascribe the health effects of a local climate to the prevailing air current, which in turn was understood to be determined by its place of origin. By contrast, Hann’s On the Origin of Föhn of 1866 zoomed in to explain foehn as a local effect. Through years of hiking in the Alps, notebook in hand, he had tracked the movements of clouds and deduced the patterns of wind. At university, he had learned the new science of thermodynamics, the physics of heat and motion. This gave him the tools he needed to interpret foehn in terms of the transformations undergone by a parcel of air as it crosses the mountains, losing moisture as it rises and warming as it descends the northern side. The resulting wind will feel hot and dry—not because it arrives from an African desert, but because of the physical properties of the atmosphere and the relationship between heat and motion.¹

This was a foundational moment in the history of an international research program that I will refer to as dynamic climatology: the application of the physics of heat and fluid motion to explain climatic conditions in their past and present distribution across the surface of the earth. Dynamic climatology deserves a prominent place in the history of the Anthropocene, for it identified and began to address the problem of conceptualizing interactions across scales of space and time, from the human to the planetary.²

Dynamic climatology flourished in Austria for as long as the Habsburgs ruled in Vienna. It was, as we will see, a science geared to the needs of this multifarious empire, just then in the throes of modernization, and Hann stood to be rewarded handsomely for his service to the state. He was on his way to acquiring the authority of an imperial-royal (kaiserlich-königlich, k.k.)³ scientist, that is, an expert on the territory of the Habsburg Monarchy as a whole—which covered nearly seven hundred thousand square kilometers of central, eastern, and southern Europe in the nineteenth century, an area nearly twice as large as the state of Germany today. Already he had begun to synthesize data from across the imperial lands, forging a continental-scale window onto the workings of the atmosphere.

Why then was Hann plagued by self-doubts as he entered the summer of his thirty-first year? As his personal diary reveals, he felt his future in Vienna to be uncertain. He was tormented by homesickness for the very mountains that had set him on his path to success, longing for the peace and mercy of their forests, as in the days of youth.⁴ He hovered on the verge of renouncing his scientific career and returning to the seclusion of the monastery where he had been educated.

To be modern, in the words of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, is to experience the conflicting pulls of cosmos and hearth: the yearning to venture beyond known frontiers and the craving for the stability of the familiar.⁵ Climate in Motion explores the consequences of this tension for the production of climatology as a global science in the nineteenth century. It argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales of space and time, in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a bricolage of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative.

Until the twentieth century, theories of the global circulation of the atmosphere ignored motions smaller and shorter-lived than a major tropical cyclone. The circle of scientists around Hann bridged that gap, developing a picture of the interaction of small scale and large that still underwrites the climate models of today. Arguably, what makes modern climate science modern is its integration of phenomena of radically different dimensions. This requires methods appropriate to each scale; satellites are ideal for tracking hurricanes, for instance, but of little use for following the minute fluctuations in temperature and humidity that matter to the growth of a seedling. What’s more, atmospheric phenomena at different scales do not proceed independently of each other. The breeze that, out of nowhere, ruffles the pages of your book may be an indirect effect of a storm brewing off the coast. As the sun’s energy warms air at the equator and causes it to rise, it drives a hemispheric churning motion, which in turn generates smaller eddies, from which even smaller whirls spin off. These cross-scale exchanges of energy and even matter are what make global warming so all-encompassing and so hard to predict. One of the greatest challenges scientists face today is to model the very small-scale process by which water condenses around an atmospheric particle and begins to form a cloud, in relation to the very large-scale effects that clouds have on the global radiative energy balance. In order to predict, say, the earth’s average temperature a century from now, scientists cannot ignore processes that unfold far more quickly and on far smaller scales, such as cloud formation. They deal with this problem by means of what they call scale analysis, meaning that they estimate which are the significant phenomena for the purposes at hand and work with those to produce a reasonable approximation. The history of dynamic climatology is the story of this multiscalar, multicausal way of engaging with the world.⁶

When I began the research for this book in 2001, the field of climate science looked rather different than it does today, in 2017. The questions being put to climate models were almost exclusively about the global impacts of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. The spatial and temporal resolution of most models was too low to generate predictions that could be of use to communities planning for the medium term; nor did most models factor in regional-scale forcing mechanisms. Only recently has the question of regional impacts gained the attention of a significant portion of the modeling community.⁷ Meanwhile, stalemates over international agreements on climate change have confirmed the need for action at the local and regional levels—and thus for reliable predictions at these spatial scales. Back in the early 2000s, one of the few research groups modeling regional impacts was CLEAR, or Climate and Environment in the Alpine Region. This group emphasized the value of alternating between local and global perspectives, or downscaling.⁸ Based in Switzerland, they pointed to the Alps as a region that exemplified the benefits of small-scale climate analysis alongside global modeling. Prescient as their program may have been for the twentieth century, it struck me as an echo of the lessons of Habsburg climatology.

Working without the aid of digital computers, Habsburg scientists invented creative ways to detect, model, and represent atmospheric motions. These included turning plants into measuring instruments, imagining riverbeds as models of atmospheric waves, and inventing new literary and cartographic genres. Although you may not have heard their names before, their ingenuity was widely celebrated in their own day. Hann was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1910, and his publications were said by an American colleague to tower over other books as the pyramids of Gizeh tower over the valley of the Nile.⁹ Others have observed that the research of Hann and his colleagues was eclectic: whereas most climate scientists today specialize in research at a single scale, the range of phenomena considered [by Austrian scientists] spanned the space-time scales from the global circulation to boundary layer turbulence,¹⁰ from the planetary scale to the dimensions of agriculture and human health. Indeed, these scientists produced a novel conceptual apparatus for tracking the transfer of energy from hemispheric flows down to molecular motions. What’s more, they found creative ways to make their insights vivid to a nonscientific audience. This new way of thinking about local winds in relation to a hemispheric circulation in turn breathed life into the Habsburg idea of transnational interdependence.

ENVIRONMENT AND EMPIRE

A twenty-first-century reader might be surprised to open the first volume of the Journal for Austrian Ethnography (1895) and find an article titled The Importance of Collecting Popular Names for Plants.¹¹ What did the study of human cultures have to do with botany? How was the emergence of human science in this multiethnic state tied to the study of the nonhuman environment?

Over the past two decades, historians have demonstrated the many ways in which the making of environmental knowledge in the long nineteenth century was inextricably bound to European empire-building. This is true, first, in the sense that imperial expansion transformed colonial environments in far-reaching and irreversible ways. Environmental historians have shown how empires depleted natural resources, disrupted ecosystems, and introduced invasive species, often leading to the extinction of native ones. Europeans justified their empires by pointing to their superiority as masters of nature. But such mastery counted both humans and nonhumans among their victims. In some cases, the nonhuman environment has avenged itself against the imposition of control by means of epidemics, floods, earthquakes, and other catastrophes.¹² In other cases, empires eventually instituted policies of conservation, and yet these have often come at the expense of indigenous rights. This is the tragic side of the relationship between environment and empire.¹³

At the same time, the environmental history of modern empires is also a history of learning. This is not to argue, as George Basalla did in the 1960s, that the explosion of natural historical knowledge that began in the sixteenth century was the achievement of intrepid European naturalists penetrating the wilds of other continents.¹⁴ Nor is it to forget that some intellectual traditions were unlearned, even forcibly suppressed, as a result of colonization. Rather, over the past two decades, historians have shown precisely how the celebrated discoveries of metropolitan elites rested on knowledge appropriated from colonial naturalists and native informers.¹⁵ The knowledge produced in this way included strains that we would now call ecological: in particular, knowledge of the distribution of plants and animals in relation to conditions of climate and soil. Indeed, the classification of new species has surged along the edges of expanding empires, even if closely followed by the disappearance of those newly cataloged species.¹⁶ In other words, there is an uncomfortably intimate relationship between the growth of environmental knowledge and the environmental destruction wrought by imperialism.

What’s more, some of the modern era’s most damning critiques of imperialism and its ecological costs have come from scientists in the service of empires, from Johann Forster in the eighteenth century to Arthur Tansley in the twentieth. Twenty years ago, Richard Grove argued that the origins of modern environmentalism lie in the responses of colonial naturalists to the environmental degradation they witnessed on Pacific islands and for which they knew Europeans to be responsible. More recently, Helen Tilley has shown how twentieth-century scientists working for the British Empire in Africa developed their own environmentalist ideas by contrasting European land-use practices with the sustainable methods of local agriculture.¹⁷ In some cases, imperial science proved sufficiently independent of imperial ideology to generate genuinely new knowledge. No less significant for the history of environmental science and politics was the scale of empire in the nineteenth century. Its networks of information exchange laid the basis for the global science of the late twentieth century and have been linked suggestively to the emergence of a planetary consciousness.¹⁸ From this angle, empires have been experimental sites for exploring ties of interdependence among far-flung humans, nonhumans, and the inorganic world.¹⁹

DEFINING CLIMATE

This book inquires into the role of nineteenth-century empires in producing knowledge specifically about climate. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the meaning of climate in European languages was in flux. Since ancient times, climate had signified the latitude-dependent effect of solar radiation, klima being the Greek word for inclination or the angle of incidence of sunlight. Three climate zones neatly banded each hemisphere: frigid at the poles, temperate at midlatitudes, and torrid at the equator. By the nineteenth century, however, geographic explorers and medical and agricultural researchers were drawing attention to the complex spatial variability of atmospheric conditions. Thus late nineteenth-century scientists contrasted the solar climate, meaning the distribution of heat to be expected on the basis of solar radiation and the known composition of the earth’s atmosphere, with the physical or terrestrial climate, meaning climate as modified by any number of factors, such as the shape of the earth’s surface and the distribution of land, water, and vegetation. This terminological confusion reflected a methodological problem of scale. Scientists of the nineteenth century possessed rudimentary physical models of the planetary circulation of the atmosphere, but they had no way to integrate these models with accumulating evidence of the fine-grained variability of climate across the surface of the earth. As one medical writer in the Silesian spa town of Kudowa expressed the difficulty in 1908, "Even if this locally restricted meaning of climate is not common usage, the phrase ‘weather or atmospheric conditions’ [Wetter oder Witterung] wouldn’t always be accurate in what follows, and I must apologize in advance for the lack of an appropriate expression."²⁰ Thus climate was a fundamentally ambiguous concept in the nineteenth century, in ways that have escaped the attention of historians.

The temporal dimensions of climate were just as ambiguous as its spatial extent. The relevant time scales ranged from the seasonal, in the case of medical and agricultural climatology, to the geological, in the case of theories of the Ice Ages. Indeed, these temporal perspectives were proving impossible to reconcile. How could the evidence unearthed in the 1830s and 1840s of an ancient Ice Age be squared with the apparent stability of the earth’s climate since the start of human records?²¹ If climate implies a time-averaged state, it was not clear how long an interval was appropriate to its definition.

Finally, the meanings of climate also varied in their proximity to human interests. Alexander von Humboldt had famously defined climate as all the changes in the atmosphere that perceptibly affect our sense organs.²² This anthropocentric definition reflected the fact that climate was recognized as an influence on almost every aspect of human life: health, agriculture, labor, trade, even the psyche. Indeed, the historical roots of climate science lie largely in practical efforts to improve everyday life. Much of our knowledge of climate has come from everyday experience with the many aspects of nature that stand in mutual dependence with the atmosphere, such as vegetation, water supply, and soil conditions. As historians have noted, professional scientists often built on the traditional knowledge of those whose livelihoods depended on climatic knowledge, such as farmers, sailors, and fishermen.²³ At the same time, climatological knowledge was being produced by new kinds of experts of many stripes, including botanists, foresters, agricultural scientists, geologists, paleontologists, mining officials, medical geographers, pharmacists, and balneologists. Nineteenth-century botanists, for instance, referred to vegetation as an ideal climatic record, everywhere a reflection of the local climate, while geologists recognized glaciers as the best possible climatic measuring instruments (Klimamesser).²⁴ Just as numerous were the institutions that produced knowledge relevant to climatology. At European universities, climatology might be studied and taught in any or all of three different faculties: geography, physics, and medicine. Climate knowledge was also produced far beyond the walls of universities: at public observatories, by academies of forestry or agriculture, by voluntary associations like Austria’s popular Meteorological Society, and by European explorers and travelers the world over.²⁵ Thus the study of climate mattered in practical ways to people of all kinds. At the same time, scientists were increasingly interested in atmospheric phenomena unfolding in the upper layers of the atmosphere. These were accessible only to intrepid mountaineers and balloonists—and they bore no obvious relation to human life.²⁶

When did people begin to speak of climate in the singular, in the sense of a property of the earth as a whole? As we will see in chapters 7 and 9, the concept of the global climate entered popular discourse in central Europe in the 1870s, in the midst of a heated debate over anthropogenic climate change. But that is only half the story. Just as important was the rigorous definition of a local climate that entered with it. A modern, multiscalar concept of climate was born from encounters between scientists and others with wide-ranging claims to climate expertise.

VARIETIES OF EMPIRE

European empires of the nineteenth century seized on climatology as a tool for adapting newly acquired colonial environments to imperial ends. Climate was studied in relation to a swiftly changing global distribution of production and trade, as well as shifting theaters of military conflict. It was with the aid of such research that the global spread of capitalism was understood at the time to make the best of the diverse endowments of the world by encouraging the most efficient use of each country’s particular resources.²⁷ Eighteenth-century savants had typically regarded the fit between a society and its natural environment as the result of a divine plan.²⁸ Nineteenth-century geographers saw it instead as the result of a process of biological and cultural adaptation, one in which imperialists intended to intervene. Theories of acclimatization supported imperial plans to settle Europeans permanently in the torrid zone.²⁹ In principle, if not always in practice, climatology could inform decisions about where to locate agricultural settlements and colonial towns. It also inspired the construction of high-altitude medical rehabilitation centers for sick and weary colonists in the tropics, taking advantage of cooler, drier mountain air.³⁰

One historian has characterized nineteenth-century climatology as a sleepy backwater,³¹ a charge that held true in certain parts of the world. In many parts of Europe’s overseas empires, climatology developed as a scattershot study of local climates, paired with the self-serving theory that the tropics, whatever they were, were unsuitable for European labor.³² Across Europe and North America in the mid-nineteenth century, governments and private societies organized networks of meteorological observers. But this data was mined primarily for the purposes of storm forecasting. As the Habsburg climatologist Alexander Supan explained in 1881, Climate has retreated with the advance of weather.³³ In 1908 Napier Shaw complained of the waste of the British Meteorological Office, from which he had recently retired as director. Data was streaming in, but to what end? Shaw lamented as well the discontinuities of the imperial network—four observatories and over four hundred stations of one sort or another in the British Isles; an elaborate installation of wind-measuring apparatus at Holy head; besides other ventures squandered abroad; an anemometer at Gibraltar, another at Saint Helena; a sunshine recorder at the Falkland Isles, half a dozen sets of instruments in British New Guinea, and a couple of hundred on the wide sea.³⁴ Waste in this sense was a function of the inability or unwillingness of scientists of overseas empires to mediate between local observations and global models.³⁵

Indeed, histories of science and empire tend to assume a divergence of interests and epistemic commitments between imperial scientists and local collectors. Imperial scientists figure in this scholarship as intellectual lumpers, proponents of generalization, against the splitters who would insist on nature’s local variability. Imperial science in this sense was embodied by the London botanist Joseph Hooker, the director of the imperial botanical garden at Kew, who claimed that his colonial correspondents paid too much attention to minute differences that when long dwelt upon . . . assume minute value.³⁶ According to this account, the global perspective of modern science emerged at the expense of the local.

However, historians have paid far less attention to the geography of knowledge production in the continental empires of nineteenth-century Eurasia: Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman, and Qing. In these cases the dividing line between metropolitan and provincial knowledge was far less clear. These states had in common the capacity to govern multiple cultures and to wield power from multiple centers. They took up the tools of modern science in part in the interest of developing new imperial languages of self-description that could serve as alternatives to the simplifications of nationalism. Undermining reified categories of nation and race, these sciences traced histories of migration, mixing, and cultural transfer. In other words, these late imperial sciences established the hybridity of their populations and territories as empirical facts.³⁷

As this suggests, modern states do not all render society legible in the same way.³⁸ Making a territory and its population legible need not mean abstracting away local particularities. Seeing like a state might instead mean bringing imperial diversity into sharper focus. Historians of cartography recognize that maps do not simply reflect the world; they actively contribute to the creation of a territory by visualizing its features selectively, thereby encouraging some modes of interaction with the environment and discouraging others. In this way, maps that accentuate heterogeneity may help to preserve local differences of environment and culture.³⁹

In the Habsburg Monarchy, in particular, local knowledge in fields like ethnography, medicine, and physical geography was often produced as imperial science and funded by the imperial state. Recent research by Pieter Judson and others has shown how the nineteenth-century Habsburg state created a legal space in which even former serfs could assert their rights as citizens and pursue economic development. Far from inhibiting modernization, the state’s decentralized structure allowed grassroots politics and cultural pluralism to flourish.⁴⁰ Already in 1817, the Habsburg archduke Johann, a great patron of natural history, articulated the principle that provincial patriotism could go hand in hand with loyalty to the dynasty: Austria’s strength rests on the diversity of its provinces . . . which one should carefully preserve. . . . Austria has recovered her strength after every misfortune, because each province stood on its own and considered its survival independently of the others, and yet contributed loyally to the common goal.⁴¹ Previous research hints at the implications of this ideology in fields like ethnography, medicine, and physical geography. In these cases, research conducted in the service of nationalism—perhaps even the national schools of thought celebrated by post-Habsburg historians—was sponsored by the ministry of education and articulated, often in German, by Habsburg-loyal scholars as contributions to the ideology of unity in diversity.⁴²

So it was that the Austrian Society for Ethnography instructed its members in the collection of botanical knowledge from peasants, women in particular.⁴³ Knowing the popular names for plants in multiple dialects enabled the botanist and the ethnographer jointly to track the spatial distribution of a given species and the diffusion of a given dialect. Research in this vein was of particular significance in our multilingual Austria . . . since the popular names are not only linguistic but also cultural-historical records. As we will see in chapter 10, the discovery that in some cases the same name was being used for different plants would have profound repercussions for interpretations of the relationship between climate and living things. By the same token, ethnographers took it upon themselves to record names for characteristic local winds and the rituals associated with them. Thus Hann was familiar with the adage of Alpine peasants: Steigt man im Winter um einen Stock, so wird es wärmer um einen Rock (If you climb in winter up a stair, one less coat you will need to wear).⁴⁴ To Hann, this meant that inversions of the usual decrease of temperature with height must be a common phenomenon, which provided a clue to atmospheric conditions of thermal equilibrium. In short, the fine-grained ethnic geography patronized by the Habsburg state often involved tracking a given natural kind across the Monarchy, in order to extract differences of language and culture. By attaching value to natural diversity, such research promoted the integration of indigenous places into imperial space.⁴⁵

SEEING VARIABILITY IN NATURE

Climatology in imperial Austria merits comparison to related enterprises in other nineteenth-century imperial states. The royal-imperial Central Institute for Meteorology and Geomagnetism (Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geomagnetismus, later Geodynamik; ZAMG) was founded in Vienna in 1851, four years after the opening of the Royal Prussian Meteorological Institute. The British Meteorological Office evolved out of a committee established in 1854, while the French meteorological service was founded in 1855 and the US Weather Service in 1870. Like these other meteorological offices, the ZAMG was charged with taking advantage of the new technology of telegraphy in order to issue advance warnings of approaching storms. Indeed, Austrian scientists played an active role in the development of an international storm-warning system in the 1860s, including hosting the first-ever International Meteorological Congress in 1873, where the conventions of meteorological telegraphy were negotiated. And yet issuing forecasts was work that most ZAMG scientists disdained. Kreil, its first director, was distressed to find that not only was he expected to predict the weather, he was even held responsible for it—in certain circles he became known as the weather maker. Given the state of meteorological knowledge at the time, Kreil believed that reliable weather forecasting was a long way off. For now, as he tried to convince the public in his popular writings, the most useful knowledge would not seek to organize agriculture according to the daily fluctuations of the atmospheric conditions, but once and for all according to the average climatic character of specific places and regions.⁴⁶ Kreil and his associates genuinely believed that their research would benefit the state. But those benefits would come from knowledge of long-term regularities, not short-term predictions. They would come, in other words, from climatology, with its practical value for agriculture, medicine, tourism, trade, and military operations.

Austria seems to have been unusual in this respect, as far as one can tell from the sparse historical literature on nineteenth-century atmospheric science. At the state-sponsored observatories of Berlin, London, Paris, and Washington, DC, it seems that climatological research tended to be viewed as little more than a quaint relic of the eighteenth century, a worthy pastime for provincial amateurs or peasant farmers but of little relevance to modern science. Only in rare cases did meteorological officers in North America and western Europe choose to invest in the study of climate—that is, to shift their priority from short-term forecasts to long-term planning.⁴⁷

Climatology thrived in particular in the great land empires of Eurasia: Russia, India, and Austria. Presented with an expansive and continuous field for geoscientific research, scientists in these states began to think in new ways. Tasked with the goal of stably and efficiently exploiting the territory’s resources, they set out to map its natural regions and transition zones. One historian of imperial Russia has aptly described this enterprise as a scientific project of regionalization. The regionalizing sciences of the nineteenth century were holistic enterprises intent on analyzing local differences within a larger, integrated context.⁴⁸ The baseline definition of these regions was climatic: average temperatures and rainfall were the fundamental data on which a mental map of imperial difference was being constructed. Scientists thus came to appreciate the heterogeneity of climates and to seek the causes of their differentiation.

The choice to emphasize or de-emphasize the diversity of an empire’s human and nonhuman subjects—the choice between pursuing imperial climatology as a coherent overview or as a patchwork of local details—was always a strategic political decision. From the perspective of Henry Francis Blanford, chief of the Indian Meteorology Department (founded 1875), the subcontinent furnished an ideal site for climatological research: a single, contained landmass displaying in miniature nearly all the variations in climate to be found on the earth’s surface, with an unobstructed view of the formation of tropical storms. To speak of the climate of India in the singular, he argued, would be as misleading as if we were to speak of its inhabitants in terms implying that they are a homogeneous race, alike in ethnic and social characters, culture and belief.⁴⁹ Yet others expressed India’s suitability for climatological study in language with quite a different political valence. They emphasized the order and regularity of the Indian climate (now in the singular) and the ease with which British science could master it.⁵⁰

In Russia, as Wladimir Köppen pointed out in 1895, climatology followed the tsar’s troops, as the Russians pushed into the Crimea, the Caucasus, Siberia, and beyond. Russia’s conquests to its west have quickly expanded our knowledge. For the Russian soldier is followed with remarkable speed by the Russian [scientific] observer, and out of the impenetrable dens of thieves . . . have for a long time now been appearing practicable, uninterrupted meteorological data series.⁵¹ The work of Russia’s foremost climatologist, Alexander Voeikov (1842–1916) reflected the ambitions of a modernizing and expanding empire. He produced theories of the global climate system and of the influence of climate on social life, and he argued that unfavorable environments could be improved through rational water use.⁵² Meanwhile, a more cautious research program in soil science under Vasilii Dokuchaev was investigating charges of human-induced climate change in the black earth region of the Russian steppe.⁵³ As Catherine Evtuhov shows, the sheer bulk and diversity of information gathered by Dokuchaev rendered it virtually unusable by the central authorities.⁵⁴ Thus enterprising Russian scientists and citizens were hard at work developing scientific methods of agricultural assessment and improvement—methods in which the imperial government took little if any interest at all.

The situation was different still in the United States. Lorin Blodget’s Climatology of the United States (1857) explicitly set out to counter the claim that the nation’s climate was especially variable or extreme.⁵⁵ East of the one hundredth meridian, Blodget insisted that the climate was uniform; and where mountains intruded, they do not shelter or expose either side, nor cause any contrasts in the character of productions respecting them. Significantly for the present study, Blodget favorably compared his nation’s climatic uniformity with the abrupt transitions, and the predominance of local changes in southern and central Europe.⁵⁶ He concluded that whatever local variability the climate might display was not worth scientific attention. Climatic uniformity, not diversity, was his ideal. It is therefore unsurprising to learn that the federal government dedicated few resources to the investigation of local climates.⁵⁷

K. UND K. CLIMATOLOGY

In Austria, too, climatology was closely tied to empire-building. From the perspective of the Habsburg state, climatology was not about exploring a dark continent but about reimagining a familiar one in the throes of change. Over the course of seven centuries, through strategic marriages and battles, the Habsburg dynasty had acquired a motley yet contiguous set of kingdoms, duchies, and principalities. Extending through nine degrees of longitude, the dynasty’s lands were crisscrossed by mountains: one chain running east from the tall peaks of the Alps in the westernmost province of Vorarlberg, then turning south along the Adriatic into the craggy towers of the Dinaric Alps; another rising to the east from the Bohemian massif up into the Carpathians, a largely unmapped range that isolated Galicia, the Habsburgs’ newest acquisition. Before the coming of the railways, the Monarchy was largely dependent on its main river way, the Danube, for transport. Its waters originated in melting glaciers in the Alps, flowed east through Vienna, Bratislava (German: Pressburg; Hungarian: Poszony), and Budapest (German: Ofen-Pest), into lands still controlled by the Ottomans in the nineteenth century, and emptied into the Black Sea. Across much of the Habsburg world—the grassy plains of the Hungarian steppe; the rocky, porous ground along the Adriatic; and the high-altitude pastures of the Alps and Carpathians—agriculture was possible only during a brief season when adequate rainfall and mild temperatures prevailed. A swing of the climate could easily spell hunger. On the other hand, excess rainfall could trigger devastating floods along the Danube and its tributaries, especially in deforested areas, as well as rockslides in the mountains. In the marshy lands of the Carpathian basin, eighteenth-century attempts at water regulation had wreaked havoc with the ecosystem and threatened flood-plain agriculture. Transport and communication across the Habsburgs’ lands was also highly dependent on climate. During Europe’s Little Ice Age, from roughly the thirteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, portions of the Danube often froze, and snow blocked certain mountain passes year round. With the period of warming that set in circa 1860, baseline expectations from the past were not necessarily useful guides to the future.⁵⁸

Figure 1. Karst Landscape in Kupreško polje (Bosnia-Herzegovina), by Zygmunt Ajdukiewicz, 1901. The karst lands of the Dinaric Alps were known for their sinkholes, caves, and underground waterways.

The changes afoot in central Europe in the nineteenth century were socioeconomic as well as climatic. For now a little rural village and its surroundings can shut itself in with all that it has, all that it is, and all that it knows, wrote the novelist and naturalist Adalbert Stifter at midcentury. Soon, however, this will no longer be so, and [the village] will be caught up in the dealings of the world beyond it.⁵⁹ The nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire was a geographically extensive but semiclosed economic system, having been excluded from the German Zollverein in the 1830s. It was out of the race for overseas colonies and had minimal prospects for expansion in southeastern Europe. Within its borders, capitalism was already beginning to produce its signature geography of unevenness. Between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the stock market crash of 1873, industrialization transformed the geography of production in the Habsburg lands. Regions of the Monarchy that had once been economically self-sufficient were thrust into the role of imperial periphery, generating a flood of migrants to the Monarchy’s new industrial centers. After the crash, capital investment shifted to the periphery in order to take advantage of cheaper land, raw materials, and labor.⁶⁰

In this context, the new genre of climatography (chapter 6) played in part the role of advice manual for repurposing natural environments to fit the new economy. Possibilities included introducing new crops (beets for sugar, potatoes for spirits), launching a tourist industry, or building spas or sanatoriums to provide climatotherapy. At the same time, imperial climatologists were called on to adjudicate between proponents of development and those of conservation. Deforestation or swamp drainage was blamed for a deterioration of the climate within the span of historical memory in several areas, above all Bohemia, the Hungarian plains, and the karst regions of Carniola, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Bosnia.⁶¹ Everywhere it was argued that restoring forests would create a moister, more fertile climate. Inquiries into suspected climatic shifts in the course of human history were thus highly public and politically fraught.

Figure 2. Angyalháza puszta, eastern Hungary, 1891. Note the draw well in the background, typical of the region.

In all these ways, climatology’s history in Austria sheds light on this science’s close ties to nineteenth-century imperialism more generally. At the same time, the scientific institutions of the supranational state formed a unique lens onto the natural world. Unlike administrators in Washington or Saint Petersburg, the emperor’s ministers in Vienna saw good reasons, both practical and ideological, to support the study of climate down to the details of the smallest scales. And unlike British scientists, with their insistence on the fundamentally orderly atmosphere of India, Habsburg climatologists were far more ready to grapple with the true complexity of their data. As we will see, their day-to-day focus on minute fluctuations and statistical subtleties was the flip side of their quest for an all-encompassing overview.

Julius Hann made this point most effectively. After admitting that he had spent an entire week determining how best to standardize measurements of the distribution of air pressure in central and southern Europe, he cited Francis Bacon in his defense. Bacon had once remarked that the natural philosopher who neglects details is like a haughty prince who ignores the petition of a poor woman: He who will not attend to things like these as being too paltry and minute, can neither win the kingdom of heaven nor govern it.⁶² The Baconian metaphor of the empire of nature underscored the affinity of this scientific precept with the logic of the multinational state. In fact, Francis I (1804–35) had been praised in nearly identical language for his comprehensive knowledge of the Habsburg realm. The first ruler to call himself Emperor of Austria and to envision the dynastic lands as a unified state, Francis was known to occupy himself with what might seem to be insignificant local matters. Particularly on his frequent tours of the provinces, he was said to display his extensive, one could even say all-encompassing knowledge of the laws, customs, and morals of all parts of his great kingdom. . . . A phrase that was often on his lips was this: ‘There is no affair that a priori and according to general principles could be called large or small; matters are only large or small in comparison to and in relation to other things.’⁶³

TOWARD A HISTORY OF SCALING

The history of climate science needs to be seen, then, as part of a history of scaling: the process of mediating between different systems of measurement, formal and informal, designed to apply to different slices of the phenomenal world, in order to arrive at a common standard of proportionality. In the natural and social sciences, scaling (upscaling, downscaling) refers to the process of adapting models to apply at larger or smaller dimensions of space and time. But scaling is also something we all do every day. It is how we think, for instance, about how one individual’s vote might influence a national election, or whether buying a hybrid car might slow global warming. It can also be a way of situating the known world in relation to times or places that are distant or otherwise inaccessible to direct experience. Scaling makes it possible to weigh the consequences of human actions at multiple removes and to coordinate action at multiple levels of governance. It depends on causal factors that are likewise of varying dimensions, from an individual’s imagination to translocal infrastructures, institutions, and ideologies. A focus on scaling is timely for the field of history today, at odds as it is over going big. Rather than framing this as an either/or choice, we might think historically about what is involved in working between and across different scales of observation, analysis, and action.⁶⁴

Scaling is a necessary step in the production of what John Tresch calls cosmograms: the representations we use to situate ourselves in relation to the rest of the universe, to map our interconnections and mutual influences. The history of scaling thus calls for a materialized intellectual history on Tresch’s model. As he writes, Cosmological ideas take on realist force when they are anchored, housed, and transmitted in objects, technical networks, routine practices, and social organizations.⁶⁵ Histories of scaling must therefore attend to the tools and practices of commensuration, which are not limited to measuring instruments in the traditional sense. For instance, Benedict Anderson pointed out decades ago that the novel and the newspaper were key early tools for creating a new scale of thought in the nineteenth century: the nation.⁶⁶ More recently, Richard White has traced the role of the railroads in creating a new, politicized space in nineteenth-century North America, for which transport rates provided the new metric of proximity and distance.⁶⁷ When it comes to climate change, some of the most important tools of scaling—for understanding the weather of the here and now in relation to large-scale, long-term processes—have been found, not made. These include migratory animals, tree rings, ice cores, fossils, rocks, and living plants.

In the nineteenth century, the scalar imagination was restless. A host of technical developments—including the improvement of microscopes, telescopes, photography, telegraphy, and electrical clocks—allowed human observation to push down into the smallest dimensions of space and time, as well as outward, across the earth, to the solar system, the galaxy, and beyond. Some in the nineteenth century spoke of the annihilation of time and