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• 07 jan 2013

  08 jan 2013

  09 jan 2013

  Oxford

  Conference, symposium - History

  Climate and Weather: Science as Public Culture

  Scientific Communication and its History – III

  This conference is the third in a series devoted to historical and contemporary perspectives on the communication of science and technology. Climate and weather provide a particularly rich and challenging case study to complete the conference series. As with other disciplines studied during the previous conferences, the climate sciences are characterised by complexity: in their professional networks; their conceptual models; and the logistics of their large-scale data and computing needs. Yet few modern scientific disciplines attract the same level of public engagement, in both everyday life and passionate debate on the future of the planet. Moreover, their status at the intersection of policy, scientific controversy and the public sphere is not a recent development: the same issues and fault lines ran through meteorology from the 18th-century onwards. Shifting interests within the history of science and the development of environmental history have greatly expanded the field in recent years. The conference will provide an opportunity to reflect on these historiographical developments via a specific focus on the communication of weather and climate from the 18th to the 21st centuries. The conference will address three themes in particular: Commodification of meteorological knowledge, Media, and Historicizing climate history.

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