In the 18th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Vicki Arroyo, Executive Director of the Georgetown Climate Center and Professor from Practice at Georgetown Law. Professor Arroyo explains which climate policies have worked across the United States, and identifies where emissions reductions will be hardest to achieve. She emphasizes a pressing need for greater adaptation across America, and describes which policies the Biden Administration should pursue to confront the Climate Crisis.

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In the 15th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Kathryn de Luna, Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University.

​Professor de Luna combines paleoscience, archaeology, and historical linguistics to explore the deep history of eastern, central and southern Africa before the 20th century. At Georgetown, she is on the cutting edge of developing new courses and teaching methods that introduce students to ways of understanding the past that go well beyond the traditional practice of history. In this episode, Professor de Luna describes the courses she teaches; outlines the potential and peril of multidisciplinary learning; and gives concrete advice for how to make university education truly multidisciplinary.

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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. 

​To listen to this episode, click here to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. If you don't have iTunes, you can still listen by clicking here.