Science and the Public Sphere Seminar: ‘Historians and climate change: encounters and narratives’

To attend this online seminar and receive a link, please register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZItc-6oqT0iGdZKqxa9YrSnGZ6H7DrgMDxg

Societies have been debating climate change for a long time. Measuring the phenomenon has required scientific instruments to produce historical data on the weather, as did the Radcliffe Meteorological Station in Oxford for 250 years, and scientists to analyse it. It also required observers to grasp the social, economic and political consequences of these changes in the weather. How do historians recount the hopes and fears of societies that, facing the vagaries of the sky, think about and anticipate climate change? How do meteorologists, geographers and historians encounter to account for these changes in the weather? At the time of COP 26, it is time to reflect on the theoretical and practical tools that have enabled us to conceive and perceive climate change over the long term.

Science and the Public Sphere is a recurrent interdisciplinary seminar at the MFO launched in January 2021 which explores the complicated interface between scientific communities and civil society from a variety of angles, both historical, sociological, political, and philosophical. It includes a variety of events in different formats, both on-site and online, destined for both an academic and a broader audience.

Conveners: Mogens Laerke, Pascal Marty and Judith Rainhorn (MFO)