Today I realized a childhood dream by becoming lead author of an article in @nature. It coins a new term – the “History of Climate and Society” (HCS) – to refer to the interdisciplinary study of the past impacts of #ClimateChange on people. #EnvHist 1/11 nature.com/articles/s4158… It offers a critique of the field as it has been pursued to date, presents a new research framework for HCS, and shows how the application of that framework can permit new scholarship into the resilience of populations that faced modest, pre-industrial climate change. 2/11

Recently, I've transformed my thinking about the human history of #ClimateChange. My field, #ClimHist, tends to emphasize stories of crisis and collapse. Yet I increasingly believe that resilience has been the rule, rather than the exception. 1/8 #EnvHist aeon.co/essays/the-lit… When I started working on "The Frigid Golden Age," I thought I'd found a wild exception to the crises that beset almost every other civilization during the Little Ice Age (LIA) - and similar periods of past #ClimateChange. Parts of the book are framed around that exception. 2/8

There's a lot of controversy these days about the future of #nuclearenergy in a warming world. Often lost in the discussion: the perspective of historians who study the promise and peril of nuclear power in the past. Earlier this year, we edited a series on exactly that topic. In our 1st article, I joined co-editors @Danny__Mac__ and @jburnford to give my take on the nuclear question. I argue that nuclear should have a modest role in power generation for some time, partly because the risks of #climatechange are just too high. historicalclimatology.com/blog/environme…

So, I wanted to comment on a major #envhist article that’s been making the rounds lately. It argues that the Spanish arrival in the Americas in 1492 set in motion a chain of events that cooled Earth’s climate. Here’s a BBC summary. 1/15 #twitterstorians bbc.com/news/science-e… While journalists report as though the article makes an entirely new argument, its core concept actually dates back to 2003, when climatologist William Ruddiman first proposed it. The new article is really a comprehensive attempt to test an old idea. 2/15 link.springer.com/article/10.102…