Science, Models, and Historians: Toward a Critical Climate History

摘要

Environmental historians are largely absent from current climate change conversations. This essay outlines an agenda for critical climate history-asserting that it is critical for environmental historians to be more involved today and that they ought to be more critical of climate change discourse, policies, and scientific modeling of climate scenarios and the data that nourish those models. Using a case study from the Peruvian Andes and briefly describing parallel situations in the Himalaya and US Pacific Northwest, the essay shows that climate-glacier-hydrology models are inadequate and can even be misleading without the integration of historical human variables. Environmental historians are well poised to analyze and contribute to climate modeling that brings together science/knowledge, the physical environment, and societal forces. Moreover, a goal of critical climate history is to inject historical perspectives into present-day climate science and policy to help rethink the hegemony of climate science, to question the dominant climate discourse and framing, and to critique mainstream approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation. This Forum on climate change and environmental history illustrates on a broader scale both the contributions and the unfulfilled opportunities for future scholarship in critical climate history.