Steam Engines Driving Meteors: Interpretations of Climate Change in Long Nineteenth-Century West European Newspapers

Falko Schnicke, Johannes Kepler University Linz

My contribution looks into regional European newspapers and weeklies which are equally fas-cinating and under-examined sources. I will present findings such as articles from the German lands of the 1790s, pondering whether a shift in the earth’s position might be a reason for the perceived climate change or if medieval weather theories could provide answers. My material also includes an article from an Upper Austrian newspaper that, as early as 1841, suggests that the carbon output of steam engines was responsible for meteors, which were appearing more frequently at that time. Trying to explain the melting ice masses of the northern hemisphere, the author asks his readers if carbon could also be responsible. The newspaper editors pub-lished the article yet considered this idea so absurd that they explicitly distanced themselves from it. Another article from a London evening newspaper from 1870 reports the assumption that humans could be viewed as the cause of climatic change. It dismisses as speculative the idea that the clearing of forests had influenced rainfall and contributed to a drier climate in England. The article denies climate change in principle but nevertheless reports on this theory. Articles like these provide insights into contested nineteenth-century interpretations of human agency when it comes to climate change. In my talk, I will first discuss why the authors pub-lished the articles to examine climate change discourse’s early nature. Second, I will analyse the knowledge on which the articles were based or which they presented. It includes ancient theo-ries and contemporary (early-scientific) observations derived from domestic sources or colonies overseas or both. Newspaper articles, therefore, offer insights into perceptions of international, even global connections when they discuss the impacts of climate change in Greenland for Austria or when they refer to Siberia and India to explain the Central European climate.

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 Presented in Session 26. Perceptions of Climate Change in the Nineteenth Century