About the Author

Deborah R. Coen is professor of history and chair of Yale University's Program in History of Science and Medicine. She is the author of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life and The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"Deborah Coen's Climate in Motion [is] a magisterial book that builds on nearly two decades of research into what Coen calls "dynamic climatology: " the science of studying how heat and fluid motion create past and present climates across the Earth. . . . Climate in Motion is a trailblazing book: among the most important published on the history of climate science. History, to be sure, can reveal much about today's climate crisis."-- "Journal of Modern History"

"Climate in Motion gives climatology the deep and nuanced history that it lacks in contemporary discussions of global warning and climate change. Little has been written about climatology before the mid-twentieth century or outside the United States, and what is written mostly dismisses early climatologists as charlatans or drudges. Coen puts these claims to rest and shows how the work of nineteenth century climatologists is crucial to what we know about climate change today. She has written a classic, path-breaking, work--arguably the most important book in Austrian environmental history and history of science ever written."--Tara Zahra, University of Chicago

"Climate in Motion reveals how the conceptual underpinning of our modern climate science--the zooming in and out of scale from detail to grand pattern--emerged from a surprising and seemingly dusty source: the perceptions and politics of the scientists of Austria-Hungary. Dazzling yet down-to-earth, the writing sparkles with precise insight. Every historian of science and environmental historian should read this book."--Conevery Bolton Valencius, Boston College

"Fascinating and remarkably wide-ranging. . . . Climate in Motion presents a compelling case that Austria-Hungary's unique geographic and cultural geography fostered new ways of seeing, understanding, and modeling both climate and empire. In doing so, it contributes new insight to multiple historiographies. Environmental historians have long viewed the empire-climate matrix through the lens of overseas (often tropical) environments. Climate in Motion challenges readers to consider not only Austro-Hungarian contributions but also the role of other continental empires."-- "Austrian History Yearbook"

"As the Yale historian Deborah Coen reveals in her inspiring and inventive new book Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale, we owe the foundations of modern climate science to a forgotten cadre of Central European Earth scientists. . . .The Habsburgs needed to transform considerable linguistic and political diversity into a feeling of imperial unity, to make local experience meaningful as part of the whole. The state's existential challenge was an intellectual quandary for climate scientists such as Kerner and Hann, who spent their careers explaining how and why flowering azaleas and other local phenomena mattered for the planet's climate in general. In other words, and this is the hinge of Coen's masterful argument, scaling was a salient political problem no less than a scientific one for the researchers and rulers of Habsburg Europe."-- "The Atlantic"

"Coen illuminates both the emotional and intellectual lives of her subjects. Climate in Motion pays close and welcome attention to the human experience of trying to understand the global climate . . . . These are hidden, nearly invisible currents, discovered by Coen in almost illegible letters and diaries. But they are a powerful reminder that understanding rarely comes quickly or easily, especially when the mysteries are both larger and smaller than previously imagined."-- "New York Review of Books"

"What Deborah Coen calls 'the problem of scale' is familiar to us today as we confront the challenges of anthropogenic climate change. In her captivating new book, Climate in Motion, Coen shows how, in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the nineteenth century, the field of dynamic climatology had already evolved ways of accounting for problems of multiple layers and scales."-- "Times Literary Supplement"