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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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Fleming's book exhibits extensive research on Callendar and his scientific accomplishments. Because Fleming gives roughly equal attention to each of Callendar's three research areas (steam, defense, and climate) and only twenty-two pages of text discuss his climate research, the audience for The Callendar Effect thus will be readers most interested in Callendar the man and his numerous research contributions, climate among them. Those wanting to place Callendar into the broader contexts of historical understandings of climate change, anthropogenic global warming, and the history of science can turn elsewhere, including Fleming's other publications. Also, to clarify, Callendar did not invent the carbon dioxide theory, as the book's title suggests, because nineteenth-century scientists also recognized the effect of carbon dioxide on climate. Rather, Callendar rediscovered, refined, and reinvigorated the theory. |
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The eight edited chapters in Intimate Universality showcase not only cutting-edge research on the history of weather and meteorology, but also innovative approaches and insights from science and technology studies. The chapters move forward chronologically from the eighteenth century and cover a broad range of weather-related topics, starting with Vladimir Jankovic's chapter that analyzes English beliefs about how indoor air affected health and the body, and ending with James Fleming's chapter that offers a historical critique of recent proposals to counter global warming by cooling the earth through large-scale geo-engineering schemes. The remaining chapters could be classified into three categories: historical developments, effects, and uses of meteorology. Essays by Gregory Good and Richard Staley fall into the first category. Good shows how nineteenth-century scientist John Herschel refined meteorology through mathematical measurements and incorporated theories from physical geography. Staley demonstrates how studies from both meteorology and ion physics transformed cloud research at the turn of the twentieth century. In the second category, Katharine Anderson and Roger Turner analyze social and scientific effects of meteorological innovations. Anderson's excellent chapter explains how the development of new national and international weather maps in the late 1800s made meteorology more global but also more complex, thereby creating a need for increased technology to produce the maps, more centralized control of weather data to manage map production, and less popular understanding of an increasingly professionalized science of weather. Turner shows how the teaching of meteorology to U.S. military cadets during World War II triggered a new, more universalist approach to meteorology and understanding of weather. Deborah Coen and Gregory Cushman analyze uses of meteorology, the third category. Coen illustrates how Austrian meteorologists between the world wars helped demarcate Central Europe as a specific space, in part by defining unique climatic characteristics that shaped new national and regional identities. Analyzing the same period, Cushman shows how meteorology and aviation served U.S. and German neocolonialism in Latin America, but in distinct ways: "Germans often used science to lead the way for other neocolonial endeavors," Cushman concludes, "while American science tended to follow on the heels of other forms of dominance" (p. 207). |
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Intimate Universality offers a wonderful array of essays that engage questions of power, discourse, and identity through science, with most chapters discussing the history of meteorology rather than climate. The book's organizing concept is "intimate universality," the notion that air, weather, and climate are both intimate and global. The concept is important, and historians should, as the editors contend, recognize more often how people's perceptions of scale changed through time and shaped history—as did English residents' understandings of indoor air and Austrian meteorologists' conceptualization of city, country, and regional climates. Though not all chapters adhere to the "intimate universality" framework, the book nonetheless provides a fascinating, thoroughly researched, and analytically rigorous sampling of the most current scholarship on the history of meteorology. The volume should inspire more environmental historians to study weather and climate. |
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Mark Carey is assistant professor of history at Washington and Lee University. He has published essays on climate, natural disasters, and Latin American environmental history, and is currently completing a book manuscript on the social and environmental history of glacier retreat in twentieth-century Peru. |
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