Making Climate History

Two centuries after the emergence of steam technologies, and 170 years after initial suggestions that the atmosphere keeps Earth warm, scientists proved human disturbance of the Earth’s carbon budget changes the world’s climate. The work and timescales of making and knowing are decisively interrelated, yet still too little is understood about critical links between how imperial and global energy infrastructures have re-made climate and how scientists have known climate.

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2019 to 2025, ‘Making Climate History’ explores the largely unexamined connexions between histories of places, personnel, materials and power during the period that made and recognised both a global physics and a global climate.

Supplementing artefacts, maps, published writings and archival sources, the project records, curates and analyses a series of oral histories capturing the voices of a generation of retired climate scientists, science administrators and journalists who were active in the 1970s and 1980s.