Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate (Science-history Studies on Atmospheres)

The history of meteorology is a history of the artifacts and insights of modernity. It is, in some measure, a history of imperial aspirations and invention; a history of attempts to understand, predict, and even control phenomena that extend far beyond the local horizon and that change constantly on time scales ranging from geological eras and centuries to decades, years, seasons, and moments; a history of how individuals, immersed in and surrounded by the phenomena they study, attempt to construct privileged positions and address social and political imperatives. These essays, from eight of the leading historians of weather and climate, illuminate the hopes and struggles of researchers and practitioners from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, across a diverse set of issues, and on a vast array of spatial scales. If the book raises new questions or provides a measure of insight into old ones; if it stimulates in the reader a sense of the "otherness" of a bygone era or a sense of empathy and continuity with the past; if it conveys in any measure the contingency, curiosity, excitement, and frustration of the science and politics swirling around issues of weather and climate, we will deem it a success. We offer it with our sincere wish that it serves as a stimulus to related explorations in other areas of the history of science and technology that juxtapose the intimate and the universal, the local and the global.