REVIEWS
“Climate in Motion gives climatology the deep and nuanced history that it lacks in contemporary discussions of global warning and climate change. Little has been written about climatology before the mid-twentieth century or outside the United States, and what is written mostly dismisses early climatologists as charlatans or drudges. Coen puts these claims to rest and shows how the work of nineteenth century climatologists is crucial to what we know about climate change today. She has written a classic, path-breaking, work—arguably the most important book in Austrian environmental history and history of science ever written.”
— Tara Zahra, University of Chicago
"Coen's book is an inspiring example of what historians could contribute to debates on scalar thinking that the crisis of global warming inevitably provokes. Demonstrating, in deep and delightful detail, how questions of expertise, politics, and aspirations marked not only the lives of pioneering climatologists in the Habsburg monarchy but their science as well, Coen tells a story that beautifully backs up her fundamental argument: that the process of thinking across scales is a learning process and hence open to meaning-making by humans. A remarkable achievement."
— Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
“Deborah Coen has written a riveting study, brilliantly rendering the untold role played by environmental scientists in legitimating the geographic and multicultural dimensions of the Habsburg Empire. In stylish prose Coen explores how scientists of all kinds in Austria-Hungary pursued simultaneous scales of analysis, consistently validating local perspectives toward natural and cultural phenomena while linking them to broad multi-regional overviews. The distinctive combination of these perspectives produced stunning alternative frameworks for scientific understanding to the highly nationalist perspectives developed by researchers elsewhere in Europe.”
— Pieter M. Judson, European University Institute
"Coen’s extraordinary, genre-transcending book reinterprets the late Habsburg Empire through the history of its field sciences, especially its inventive, world-leading climatology. Each informed the other’s project of 'scaling': grasping the empire’s dramatic diversity and detail and its largest patterns and circulations simultaneously. Among the most creative and arresting books the history of science has yet produced, this book holds direct and significant lessons for contemporary struggles over climate change and climate knowledge. Coen has written a masterwork."
— Paul N. Edwards, Stanford University
“Climate in Motion reveals how the conceptual underpinning of our modern climate science—the zooming in and out of scale from detail to grand pattern—emerged from a surprising and seemingly dusty source: the perceptions and politics of the scientists of Austria-Hungary. Dazzling yet down-to-earth, the writing sparkles with precise insight. Every historian of science and environmental historian should read this book.”
— Conevery Bolton Valencius, Boston College
“Historians are fond of saying that science is embedded in the context of a specific time and place. Coen demonstrates this unequivocally. . . . The fact that climatology was born of a context of politics and policy, and was never far from them during its development, merits exactly this sort of examination as we wrestle with the ramifications of climate science today.”
— Nature
"Today, the field of dynamic climatology enables us to understand major interactions across space and time, on scales ranging from the human to the planetary. But where can we find the origins of this crucial approach? In this dazzling piece of historical detective work, Deborah Coen traces it back to researchers such as Julius Hann in Vienna and the practical problems faced by the Habsburg Monarchy in administering its vast and varied territories."
— Times Higher Education
"As the Yale historian Deborah Coen reveals in her inspiring and inventive new book Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale, we owe the foundations of modern climate science to a forgotten cadre of Central European Earth scientists. . . .The Habsburgs needed to transform considerable linguistic and political diversity into a feeling of imperial unity, to make local experience meaningful as part of the whole. The state’s existential challenge was an intellectual quandary for climate scientists such as Kerner and Hann, who spent their careers explaining how and why flowering azaleas and other local phenomena mattered for the planet’s climate in general. In other words, and this is the hinge of Coen’s masterful argument, scaling was a salient political problem no less than a scientific one for the researchers and rulers of Habsburg Europe."
— The Atlantic
"Conducts a detailed examination of the scientific community of the Austro-Hungarian empire to study its significant contributions to the study of global climatology. . . . Coen provides an excellent, well-researched argument for the beginnings of modern climatology and its ongoing interconnection to the political landscape. . . . Highly recommended."
— CHOICE
"Coen illuminates both the emotional and intellectual lives of her subjects. Climate in Motion pays close and welcome attention to the human experience of trying to understand the global climate . . . . These are hidden, nearly invisible currents, discovered by Coen in almost illegible letters and diaries. But they are a powerful reminder that understanding rarely comes quickly or easily, especially when the mysteries are both larger and smaller than previously imagined."
— New York Review of Books
"Skilfully blends the history of science in the late Habsburg Empire and the political history of the Empire itself. . . . Historians of science will learn much from Coen’s chapters on the invention of climatography, the shift in climate theory from a Humboldtian conception of competing oceanic and continental wind currents to one based on thermodynamics, and the effort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explain atmospheric turbulence, including storms, with the help of experimental simulations in the laboratory, which continued after the fall of the Empire. Coen’s clear account of these topics benefits from her earlier training in the history of physics . . . . Clearly, Coen understands that the struggle for acceptance of truly transnational climate science is likely to continue. It is therefore timely to have this well-written, clearly argued reminder that, in a sense, we have been there once before."
— European History Quarterly
"Deserves to be read widely—not only by historians of science, but by anyone concerned with how we might reckon with climate and its changes in the Anthropocene."
— Metascience
"What Deborah Coen calls 'the problem of scale' is familiar to us today as we confront the challenges of anthropogenic climate change. In her captivating new book, Climate in Motion, Coen shows how, in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the nineteenth century, the field of dynamic climatology had already evolved ways of accounting for problems of multiple layers and scales."
— Times Literary Supplement
Winner
— Pfizer Award, History of Science Society, 2019
"Provides fresh, stimulating, and comprehensive coverage of the rise of dynamic climatology in the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it nicely complements the work of other scholars on the development of climatology elsewhere. Though her book is very much oriented towards today’s environmental concerns, it is also thoroughly historical in its means and analytical presentation."
— Technology and Culture
"Rich and very readable. . . . This book is an extremely thought-provoking read: the journey through the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the description of an emerging science trying to describe complex change; and the portraits of people, place, and institutions using multiple perspectives are all fascinating and have much to offer."
— H-Sci-Med-Tech
"Fascinating and remarkably wide-ranging. . . . Climate in Motion presents a compelling case that Austria-Hungary’s unique geographic and cultural geography fostered new ways of seeing, understanding, and modeling both climate and empire. In doing so, it contributes new insight to multiple historiographies. Environmental historians have long viewed the empire-climate matrix through the lens of overseas (often tropical) environments. Climate in Motion challenges readers to consider not only Austro-Hungarian contributions but also the role of other continental empires."
— Austrian History Yearbook
"An excellent contribution to a variety of historiographical and theoretical conversations. Stuffed with stories, examples, data, images and analysis, Coen covers lots of ground; she also convincingly illustrates that there is a history to what many might see as a modern way of tracking interactions within the earth’s climate. Experts in the field of climatology and Habsburg history should take notice, as should environmental and imperial historians."
— Environment and History
"Deborah Coen’s Climate in Motion [is] a magisterial book that builds on nearly two decades of research into what Coen calls “dynamic climatology:" the science of studying how heat and fluid motion create past and present climates across the Earth. . . . Climate in Motion is a trailblazing book: among the most important published on the history of climate science. History, to be sure, can reveal much about today’s climate crisis."
— Journal of Modern History
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Climate and Empire
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0001
[scale;climate;science;empire]
The introduction argues that techniques of scale-crossing have been central to the development of modern climate science. It points to the nineteenth century as a turning point in this respect, highlighting the ambiguities inherent in the usage of “climate” at the time. It thus proposes to write the history of climate science as a history of “scaling.” It situates this approach with respect to recent trends in environmental history and the history of science, and it explains how Climate in Motion contributes to the study of science and empire.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1 The Habsburgs and the Collection of Nature
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0002
[Habsburg;Renaissance;botany;astrology;microcosm;cabinet of curiosities]
This is the first of four chapters that trace the mutual development of imperial ideology and empire-wide institutions of environmental science. Chapter One takes a broad and deep view of the production of climatic knowledge in the Habsburg lands. It analyzes the motivations behind the long-term collection and preservation of information about the physical and biological diversity of the dynasty’s territory, focusing on the accumulation of information in botanical gardens, libraries, mineral collections, herbaria, weather diaries, and map collections. It shows how the patriotic project of “imperial history” in the nineteenth century incorporated a tradition of natural history associated with the Habsburg emperors of the Renaissance. It suggests further that imperial history and dynastic iconography maintained the vitality of earlier ways of thinking about the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2 The Austrian Idea
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0003
[geography;political economy;art history;cartography;medicine;health]
“The Austrian Idea” recasts the long debate over the late Habsburg Monarchy’s ideological underpinnings or lack thereof. It observes that in the post-1848 period, justifications for the empire’s existence were increasingly concerned with space and geography. These arguments rested on a state-driven research program that shaped both the natural and human sciences. The goal was to reveal, through empirical research, the concrete conditions of imperial “unity in diversity.” The second half of the chapter begins to explore the consequences of this research program for climatology, drawing comparisons to other disciplines, including medicine, political economy, and art history.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3 The Imperial-Royal Scientist
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0004
[travel;Kremsmünster;Prague;Jovan Cvijic;Albrecht Penck]
This chapter introduces the figure of the imperial-royal (“kaiserlich und königlich”) scientist. It considers how the first generation of these individuals, coming of age in the 1840s and ‘50s, established their authority as experts on the territory of the Habsburg Monarchy as a whole. It begins by examining the local cultures out of which several leading imperial-royal scientists emerged: the abbey at Kremsmünster, in Lower Austria, and Prague, the capital of Bohemia. It then describes the unique features of the relationship between scientists and the state in the multinational empire. Finally, it analyzes the role of gender and bodily experience in the construction of the imperial-royal scientist’s authority and considers the significance of experiences of travel through the Monarchy for three iconic earth scientists: Eduard Suess, Albrecht Penck, and Jovan Cvijic. It has long been said that Habsburg civil servants were the keepers of the “Austrian Idea.” This chapter asks why natural scientists invested in the idea of “unity in diversity” and with what consequences for Austrian history and the history of science.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4 The Dual Task
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0005
[network;observatory;mountain;Carinthia;Bohemia;Galicia;Bosnia]
Chapter Four charts the construction in the 1840s and ‘50s of an empire-spanning geophysical observing network and a central observatory in Vienna—an institution whose responsibilities were pointedly described as “dual.” The network took different forms in different regions of the empire, as shown by comparisons of the Alpine lands, Bohemia, and Galicia. The chapter explores the meanings attached to “duality” and its political significance. Scientifically, the concept of duality tracked two strains of research: a “replicative” approach that treats the local atmosphere as a laboratory for the investigation of universal laws, and a “chorological” approach that studies the local atmosphere as a unique piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the global circulation. This chapter argues that the history of modern atmospheric science has depended on the complementarity of these approaches; to illustrate, it examines the construction of mountain observatories in Carinthia, Bohemia, and Bosnia.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5 The Face of the Empire
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0006
[cartography;climate map;Friedrich Simony;physical geography;geology;landscape;painting]
This is the first of four chapters that focus on the problems of scale facing the scientific servants of the Habsburg Monarchy and the representational techniques they developed in response. Chapter Five traces the rise of cartographic and painterly efforts to achieve a synthetic overview of the Monarchy. It begins by exploring the vision of Friedrich Simony, the geologist, landscape painter, and founder of the academic discipline of physical geography. It then turns to the technical challenges of visualizing “unity in diversity” as they played out particularly in the construction of geological and climatological maps. In climatology, this challenge generated statistical and cartographic methods that made it possible to visualize locally confined, short-lived phenomena within an image of the climatic conditions of the Monarchy as a whole. By following these innovations, Chapter Five shows how the eighteenth century’s static, regional image of climate began to give way to a dynamic and multi-scalar view.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6 The Invention of Climatography
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0007
[Adalbert Stifter;Karl Kreil;Alexander von Humboldt;climatography;cosmography;literary;genre]
This chapter introduces a nineteenth-century genre that aimed to make atmospheric data meaningful to readers of diverse backgrounds. Climatography emerged as an environmental genre in the middle of the nineteenth century, primarily in the large land empires of Eurasia. Although related to Alexander von Humboldt’s revival of “cosmography” in this same period, Austrian climatography departed from Humboldt’s model in key ways. The chapter begins by considering the literary challenge of representing “unity in diversity,” as formulated by two men with shared backgrounds and interests: the novelist Adalbert Stifter and the earth scientist Carl Kreil. From there it explores the development of climatography as a solution to the Habsburg problem of scale. By analyzing the textual strategies of Austrian climatography, Chapter Six argues that climatography held the potential to make visible local-global interactions and patterns of change.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7 The Power of Local Differences
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0008
[Julius Hann;Alexander Supan;Max Margules;dynamics;atmosphere;popular;physics;economics;health]
“The Power of Local Differences” tracks the spread of the metaphor that linked Habsburg ideology to the physics of the atmosphere. Focusing on the work of climatologists Julius Hann and Alexander Supan, it begins by showing how dynamic climatology arose in Austria as a physical-mathematical solution to the problem of precisely representing local variation while simultaneously revealing a higher unity. It then turns from scholarly research to the popular press and to the field of political economy to show how the newly dynamic science of climate became a topic of public interest. It argues, first, that dynamic climatology provided tools of scaling with which people throughout the Habsburg lands could make decisions about their own health and economic well-being. More specifically, the metaphor of the “balancing out of neighboring contrasts” served to naturalize the political structure of the Habsburg state. Finally, Chapter Seven shows how this metaphor was systematically interrogated by Max Margules, a Jewish scientist from Galicia.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8 Planetary Disturbances
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0009
[turbulence;model;disturbance;dynamics;climate change;Felix Exner;Wilhelm Schmidt;Albert Defant]
This chapter analyzes the physical-mathematical description of climate produced by Hann and his colleagues as the fruit of their practices of scaling. It follows these scientists as they investigated the interactions between atmospheric phenomena on scales ranging from the planetary down to those of agriculture and human health. Between 1903 and 1921, researchers affiliated with the Central Institute for Meteorology in Vienna, including Felix Exner, Wilhelm Schmidt, and Albert Defant, developed two essential tools of scaling: small-scale fluid models of atmospheric motion, and a quantitative measure of turbulent motion, applicable to flows of any dimensions. Putting these together with Margules’ concept of available potential energy (Chapter 7), they were able to estimate the contribution from turbulent eddies to the flow of heat and angular momentum between equator and poles. In this way, they developed a framework in which it was possible, in principle, to solve for the planetary-scale consequences of human-scale disturbances.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
9 The Forest-Climate Question
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0010
[forestry;deforestation;law;anthropogenic climate change;Anthropocene;Josef Roman Lorenz von Liburnau;Emanuel Purkyne;Bohemia]
This is the first of three chapters that use scientists’ unpublished letters and diaries to reconstruct the social and personal dimensions of the scaling process. Chapter Nine illustrates scaling as a social process by showing how imperial-royal scientists intervened to re-scale a public debate about anthropogenic climate change. In the 1870s and ‘80s, arguments raged over the climatic consequences of deforestation and swamp drainage. In Austria, this controversy was decisively shaped by the structure of the multinational state. Its competing levels of governance pressed the question of the scale on which human activities had the potential to alter the climate: was this a matter for imperial legislation, or should it be left to the diets of the crown lands, or to the municipalities? What dynamic climatology contributed to this debate was a new way of talking about climate, as a system existing at multiple scales. The chapter analyzes the social positions of scientists within this controversy, examining why some naturalists, such as Josef Roman Lorenz von Liburnau, won the authority of an imperial-royal scientist, while others, like Emanuel Purkyne in Bohemia, remained mere provincials. Finally, the conclusion points to the significance of this episode for histories of the Anthropocene.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
10 The Floral Archive
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0011
[climate change;Ice Age;Anton Kerner von Marilaun;botany;ecology]
The 1850s were a time of great confusion over the variability of climate in the past. It was not easy to reconcile the apparent stability of the earth’s climate in the present with the emerging theory of the Ice Age. Some of this work was accomplished not by physicists or geologists but by botanists. It was in part the achievement of a network of botanical researchers, professional and amateur, that spanned the Habsburg Monarchy and beyond. Chapter Ten thus considers plants as tools of temporal scaling, showing how botany became a crucial source of knowledge of climatic history. The focus is on the remarkable career of Anton Kerner von Marilaun: a pioneer of the science of plant ecology, a beloved writer and illustrator, and, as this chapter argues, a visionary climatologist.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
11 Landscapes of Desire
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0012
[Julius Hann;Heinrich Ficker;desire;sexuality;Central Asia;Croatia;Trieste]
This chapter turns to the private side of scaling. In their travels around the Habsburg lands, imperial-royal scientists were frequently beset by longings they did not know how to satisfy, whether tempted by the exotic or lured by nostalgia for home. Charged with distinguishing between things that were small yet significant, and those that were truly petty, these scientists became tormented by their liability to be distracted by irrelevant details or merely personal concerns. The private side of scaling was the effort to mediate these conflicts. This chapter relies on the private archives of Julius Hann and Heinrich Ficker to explore the affective experience of the imperial-royal scientist as he reoriented his sense of near and far. It follows these men as they pursued climatological research around the Habsburg lands and beyond, into Central Asia. In doing so, it also reconstructs the nineteenth century’s tacit theories of the relationship between climate and sexual desire.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion: After Empire
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226555027.003.0013
[local climatology;Republic of Austria;Czechoslovakia;German nationalism;scale politics]
The conclusion considers the legacies of Habsburg climatology, stressing the principle of scientific pluralism on which imperial-royal science rested. It argues that climate remained an organizing concept in discussions of the fate of Central Europe during and after the First World War. Yet, in some cases, the Habsburg scientific tradition was perverted to suit German-nationalist aims. Dynamic climatology also on survived in the “local” climatological research undertaken by the Republics of Austria and Czechoslovakia after 1918, and its influence can also be seen in literary evocations of the Habsburg Empire after its demise. More broadly, the legacy of the imperial-royal field sciences includes the ambitious projects of scientific internationalism that Habsburg scientists spearheaded in the Empire’s waning decades. Finally, the conclusion brings the analytical framework of “scaling” to bear on the politics of climate change today.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
