Data

In 1826 the Army Medical Department proposed a Meteorological Register that would aim to make sense of the “material change in the climate” at a moment when “the time for improving” the problem was visibly “fast... [ view full abstract ]

In 1826 the Army Medical Department proposed a Meteorological Register that would aim to make sense of the “material change in the climate” at a moment when “the time for improving” the problem was visibly “fast passing away.” The United States, Surgeon General Lovell offered, was especially well-suited for “bringing the question to the test of experiment and observation,” because settlement seemed to have caused substantial weather changes. So Lovell proposed a series of observations and charts, which would collect and disseminate data.

This paper will offer a brief summary of nineteenth-century climate data projects, from the Army and the New York Academy System (1825-1850) to the Smithsonian’s Meteorological Project (1849-1875), which dedicated thirty percent of the institution’s budget to a “system of extended meteorological observations, for solving the problem of American storms.” I will begin with this historicist argument that concerns about climate change are far from new. But then I will move through a series of antebellum questions that still matter in our moment: can collecting weather data help us stem the tides of climate change? Can it help us conduct experiments that reach past observing and predicting the weather? And what is the relationship between climate data and storms? (This question is at least as old as the “American Storm Controversy,” 1830-1848). Ultimately—in our particular moment—I expect to focus on two centuries of attempts to tie concerns about individual storms to thinking about climate, as we struggle to articulate their relationships—and to move from observations to solutions.