Historical Climatology is a website dedicated to share interdisciplinary research into historical climate studies with journalists, policymakers, scholars and the general public
HistoricalClimatology.com shares interdisciplinary climate change research with policymakers, journalists, scholars, and the general public. It is especially concerned with tying cutting-edge scholarship of past climate change to modern issues relevant to global warming. It emphasizes the value of climate change scholarship in disciplines other than the sciences, including history, economics, political science, law, and more. It therefore features research that links past, present, and future climate change to human activity.
In April 2010, HistoricalClimatology.com was founded by Dr. Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian then working from York University. The site was then a research blog that followed the progress of Dagomar’s research into relationships between climate change and the history of the Dutch Golden Age. By the end of 2010, HistoricalClimatology.com was on course to receive nearly 10,000 unique hits for the year, many from interested lay people. The site had tapped into a popular desire for unconventional, interdisciplinary climate history research that could shed new light on global warming.
Today, Historical Climatology.com provides regular feature stories that explore climate change from fresh angles. It offers monthly updates on the most interesting climate change web articles and academic studies. It includes tools for reconstructing past climates, and links to extensive primary and secondary source databases. It presents interviews with key newsmakers in climate change research and policymaking, as well as updates on projects under development by leading interdisciplinary scholars. It provides key videos and links, and of course it is always expanding.
HistoricalClimatology.com is associated with the Climate History Network, an informal organization for teachers and researchers interested in climate and history. Stories on HistoricalClimatology.com are usually posted on the CHN homepage, and both organizations share a Facebook page. However, whereas the CHN presents resources for academics, HistoricalClimatology.com reaches a wider audience and explicitly ties scholarship to global warming adaptation and mitigation.
HistoricalClimatology.com currently receives more than 100,000 hits per year. Its articles have been widely used in university courses in the sciences and the humanities, and it has been cited by BBC News. It is also included in lists of the Internet’s top resources on climate change. It was founded and is currently administrated by Dr. Dagomar Degroot. Editor and PhD Candidate Benoit S. Lecavalier helps to update its front page, while Social Media Editor and PhD Candidate Bathsheba Demuth contributes to its social media feeds.
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The Book of Miracles that first surfaced a few years ago and recently made its way into an American private collection is one of the most spectacular new discoveries in the field of Renaissance art. The nearly complete surviving illustrated manuscript, which was created in the Swabian Imperial Free City of Augsburg around 1550, is composed of 169 pages with large-format illustrations in gouache and watercolor depicting wondrous and often eerie celestial phenomena, constellations, conflagrations, and floods as well as other catastrophes and occurrences. It deals with events ranging from the creation of the world and incidents drawn from the Old Testament, ancient tradition, and medieval chronicles to those that took place in the immediate present of the book’s author and, with the illustrations of the visionary Book of Revelation, even includes the future end of the world.