Colloquium for: Economic, Social, Environmental and Climate History
Guest Talk: Christoph Rosol, Technical University Dresden and MPI Geoanthropology, Jena / currently Forum Basiliense, Basel
With the exceptional increase in geological findings over the course of the 19th century, the variability of the climate over geological time scales became progressively apparent. In particular, the excessively warm climate of the Eocene stood out from the geological record. At the same time every single hypothesis regarding the causes of these vastly different climates – whether astronomical, solar, terrestrial, or atmospheric in nature – remained unsatisfactory. In the first decades of the 20th century, a certain resignation therefore prevailed in the face of the ‘paleothermal problem.’ This foundational crisis in paleoclimatology was neither fundamentally solved nor suspended but gave rise to a technological-epistemic pragmatism leading to novel fields such as paleoceanography and climate modeling.
Dr. Christoph Rosol is a historian of science currently residing in Basel as a fellow at the Forum Basiliense. Until recently he headed the research cluster Anthropocene Formations at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science while also working at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der
Welt as a curator. His research is concerned with the history and epistemology of Earth (system) sciences, in particular the climate, paleoclimate, ocean and atmospheric sciences, the history of media and computing, and transdisciplinary methods for Anthropocene research.