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Book Review
| The Callendar Effect: The Life and Work of Guy Stewart Callendar (1898–1964), the Scientist Who Established the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change. By James Rodger Fleming. Boston: American Meteorological Society, 2007. xvi + 155 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, and index. Cloth $34.95; Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate. Edited by James Rodger Fleming, Vladimir Jankovic, and Deborah R. Coen. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications/USA, 2006. xx + 264 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, and index. Cloth $39.95.
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| During the last decade, historical studies on climate and weather have increased at a rate nearly impossible to keep up with. Interestingly, historians are not writing most of them. Instead, popular writers, journalists, and scholars from other academic disciplines, especially the environmental sciences, have produced the majority of studies on weather and climate history. In cases when historians have studied weather or climate, it is historians of science rather than environmental historians who have led the way. This trend continues in the two books reviewed here. In Intimate Universality and The Callendar Effect, several historians of science analyze meteorology, weather, and climate change from a range of perspectives and approaches—from the evolution of scientific theories and the contributions of key scientists to the links between weather and identity and the ways in which meteorology helped expand national or imperial power. |
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James Fleming's The Callendar Effect is a biography that explores the life and research accomplishments of British scientist Guy Stewart Callendar. A quiet family man, Callendar was also a talented and meticulous scientist-engineer whose research contributions, Fleming explains, fell into three principal areas: (1) steam engineering, especially the properties of steam at different temperatures and pressures; (2) national defense during World War II, when Callendar helped design, among other things, a project that literally burned fog off of runways so warplanes returning from bombing raids could land safely; and (3) climate research. Callendar's most famous climate contribution was his 1938 article that outlined what is now called the "Callendar Effect," which, as Fleming explains, means that "global climate change can be attributed to an enhanced greenhouse effect due to elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources, primarily from the combustion of fossil fuels" (p. 65). |
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