Making Climate Knowledge

Undergraduate

This course explores the history of scientific knowledge of Earth’s climate from Europeans’ first encounters with the Americas to the politics of climate knowledge in the 2020s. We see how scientists learned to track interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary, and how they conceived the ambition of predicting and even controlling the climate system. Ironically, the rise of modern climate science depended on the very processes of industrialization that it later called into question. It was also indelibly shaped by European imperialism and by the theories of human difference that Europeans used to justify colonization and enslavement. Coming to terms with the historical entanglement of climate science with colonialism and racial capitalism is a necessary step towards climate justice. To make vivid the multiplicity of ways of knowing climate, the course includes visits to the Yale Farm, the Medical Historical Library, and the Center for British Art. HU 0 Course cr HTBA