Becoming a Scientific Fact: The Mediazation of a Climate Change Theory at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Karolin Wetjen, University of Kassel

At the end of the nineteenth century, the climate was an omnipresent issue in geological and meteorological scientific debates leading to early findings that climate is indeed not stable but varies not only on geological time scales but also on decadal and century time scales due to natural processes. For example, Eduard Brückner (1863–1927), one of the leading geologists and meteorologists of the time, published a lengthy study and several articles on recent and historical climate fluctuations and probable climate periods of 35 years. Unlike other contemporary scientists, Brückner explicitly used his discovery to predict imminent climate changes and speculate on these changes' socio-economic impacts in climatical periods. Furthermore, Brückners findings and his predictions of possible economic, political, and social consequences were not only discussed in scientific journals but also in magazines for a general audience. Geographical and colonial magazines like the Globus or Petermanns Mitteilungen regularly mentioned the "Brückner period" and informed a broader public on these debates on climate fluctuations and the imminent impacts on agriculture, society, and economy. The paper uses the theory of climate periods that was first formulated in 1890 by Eduard Brückner as a starting point to analyze in which ways scientific knowledge on climate change was produced, disseminated, and regarded as an authoritative fact in western societies. Following the different media in which this knowledge was articulated – and with this using an approach that Jeremy Green recently proposed – will show how widely climate fluctuations were perceived even outside academia and how it was mediated, interpreted, and reflected upon in the nineteenth-century.

No extended abstract or paper available

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