In the 13th and most unusual episode of Climate History, our podcast, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde ​share their reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic, in light of their expertise as environmental historians.

Among other topics, Degroot and Moesswilde consider how historians might someday write about the pandemic, interrogate the parallels between COVID and climate reporting, and imagine how (and how not) to draw lessons from the era of social distancing for the even bigger fight against climate change.

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In the 12th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Amy Hessl of West Virginia University and Valerie Trouet of the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona. Hessl and Trouet are two of the world's leading paleoclimatologists. They scour the Earth to measure the growth rings in trees, which they use to uncover ancient climate changes that likely influenced the fate of past societies. Among other work, they have led groundbreaking studies that identified ancient changes in atmospheric circulation, hurricane frequency, the prevalence of  wildfires, and even the precipitation patterns that may have set the stage for the expansion of the Mongol Empire. 

In this interview, we discuss the nature of tree ring research, the challenge of communicating its insights to the public, and Professor Trouet's groundbreaking new book, Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings.

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In the 11th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Victoria Herrmann, president and managing director of the Arctic Institute and one of Apolitical's top 100 influencers on climate policy. Dr. Herrmann's scholarship has focused on media representations of the Arctic and its peoples. Yet while completing her PhD as a Gates Scholar in the Scott Polar Institute at Cambridge University, Herrmann launched several projects aimed at building adaptation to climate change in coastal communities. Her focus has been to connect scholars with stakeholders on the ground, turning abstract knowledge into tangible action.
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In this interview, we discuss how climate change scholarship can (and perhaps should) inform concrete action, and how action can enrich scholarship. We consider how graduate students can find their public voice, weigh the importance of storytelling for encouraging climate change action, and contemplate sources of hope in a rapidly warming world.

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In the tenth episode of Climate History, our podcast, Emma Moesswilde and Dagomar Degroot interview Bathsheba Demuth, assistant professor of environmental history at Brown University. Professor Demuth specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interests in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she spent several years training sled dogs. In the years since, she has visited and lived in Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. She has a BA and MA from Brown University, and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in publications from the American Historical Review to the New Yorker. Her first book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is now out with Norton, and has received rave reviews in both popular and academic publications. 

Professor Demuth is a returning guest. In our first interview, she introduced the major themes of what was then her doctoral dissertation, and is now ​Floating Coast. In this episode, she describes how she wrote the book, and what we can learn from it. She details her experiences in the Arctic, her deep engagement with the community of Old Crow, her thinking about non-human actors in historical stories, her success in writing for the general public, and her views on what the past can reveal about the future of the rapidly-warming Arctic.​

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In the ninth episode of Climate History, our podcast, we relaunch with a new co-host: Emma Moesswilde, PhD Student in Environmental History at Georgetown University. For the relaunch, Moesswilde and Dagomar Degroot are joined by Kevin Anchukaitis,  associate professor of geography at the University of Arizona and one of the world's leading paleoclimatologists. Anchukaitis uncovers and interprets climate changes over the past two thousand years. He’s currently active in projects that identify past climatic trends in nearly every part of the Earth. He uses many techniques to reconstruct those trends, including dendroclimatology; climate field reconstruction and spatiotemporal data analysis; stable isotope analysis; proxy systems modeling, and the integration of paleoclimate data with General Circulation Modeling. 

In this episode, Moesswilde, Degroot, and Anchukaitis discuss how and why Earth's climate has changed over the past two thousand years; how scholars "reconstruct" those changes; how historians can link the changes to the course of human history; why this research matters today; and how to communicate scholarship on past climates to the widest possible audience. 

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In the eighth episode of the Climate History Podcast, PhD candidate Robynne Mellor (Georgetown University) interviews Dr. Dagomar Degroot, director of HistoricalClimatology.com, about his new book: The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720. Dr. Degroot is an assistant professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, where his research focuses on societal resilience and adaptation to abrupt climate change; conflict and climatic trends, particularly in the pre-industrial Arctic; and the environmental history of outer space. His next book, Civilization and the Cosmos, under contract with Harvard University Press and Viking UK (a division of Penguin Random House), will trace how dramatic environmental changes across the solar system influenced human history. At Georgetown, he teaches courses on a range of interdisciplinary topics, from the history of Mars in science and culture to the present-day Anthropocene. He is also the co-director of the Climate History Network, the director of the Climate Tipping Points Project, and the usual host of the Climate History Podcast. 

In the seventh episode of the Climate History Podcast, Dr. Dagomar Degroot interviews a fast-rising star in the field of environmental history: Dr. Bathsheba Demuth, assistant director of HistoricalClimatology.com and the Climate History Network. Dr. Demuth is an assistant professor at Brown University, where she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She has spent years in the Arctic and published on the environmental history of everything from the gold rush to reindeer and walrus hunting across the far north. Remarkably, she has already won no fewer than twelve fellowships and four awards, despite beginning her position at Brown only last year. She is currently working on a major book, based on her dissertation, that will explore the environmental history of the Bering Strait from the 1840s to the 1980s.

In this episode, recorded at the recent conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Chicago, professors Degroot and Fleming discuss how experiences in Old Crow, Yukon kindled Demuth's interest in environmental history; changing environments and life-ways in the North American Arctic; the history of communism and capitalism across the Bering Strait; and the history of animals in the far north.  

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In the sixth episode of the Climate History Podcast, ​Dr. Dagomar Degroot interviews one of the world's best-known historians of science: Dr. James Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College. Professor Fleming is perhaps the leading historian of meteorology and climatology. He has degrees in astronomy, atmospheric science, and history, and he is the founder and first president of the International Commission on History of Meteorology. He is editor-in-chief of History of Meteorology, and he has written and reviewed for the IPCC. His extensive publications include Meteorology in America, 1800-1870 (Johns Hopkins, 1990), Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford, 1998), The Callendar Effect (AMS, 2007), Fixing the Sky (Columbia, 2010), and most recently, Inventing Atmospheric Science (MIT, 2016).

In this episode, Professors Degroot and Fleming  discuss how a plane crash launched Fleming's career, the deep history and future prospects of geoengineering, and the birth of modern atmospheric science in the early twentieth century. 

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In the fifth episode of the Climate History Podcast, Dr. Dagomar Degroot interviews the first returning guest in the history of the podcast, Dr. Sam White of Ohio State University, the co-founder and co-director of the Climate History Network. Professor White is perhaps the leading environmental historian of the "Little Ice Age," a period of global cooling that, according to some definitions, endured from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries. 

In 2011, Cambridge University Press published Professor White's first book, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. In it, Professor White argues that falling temperatures and a landmark drought contributed to famines the Ottoman countryside that in turn incited a bloody rebellion. The book won the Middle East Studies Association Albert Hourani award, the Turkish Studies Association Fuat Köprülü award, and the British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society prize for the best book in Middle East and Turkish studies. Professor White has authored a major new book, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and America’s Colonial Beginnings, which is forthcoming with Harvard University Press. You can click here to watch Professor White discuss the book. 

In this episode, Professors Degroot and White discuss the prospects for climate research in the Trump Administration; the influence of the Little Ice Age on the European colonization of the Americas; and a major new digital mapping initiative that they are developing with the financial and logistical support of Georgetown University and the Ohio State University. 

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