Climate History Podcast

The final episode of the Climate History podcast is also the first episode of The Climate Chronicles, a new podcast created, produced, and narrated by our host, Professor Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University. The Climate Chronicles is a unique multimedia production that uses dramatic storytelling to explain how climate change shaped the history of humanity, from our evolution to the current cl...

In the 22nd episode of Climate History, co-hosts Emma Moesswilde and Dagomar Degroot interview Christian Pfister, co-author (with Heinz Wanner) of a new book: "Climate and Society in Europe: The Last Thousand Years." Pfister is one of the founders of the related fields of climate history and historical climatology. He explains how he helped establish these fields, how they benefit from genuine col...

In the 21st episode of Climate History, co-host Emma Moesswilde interviews Debjani Bhattacharyya, Associate Professor of History at Drexel University. Professor Bhattacharyya is among the most innovative scholars of past climate change, and the histories she uncovers have clear relevance for the future of the Indian Ocean World. Moesswilde and Bhattacharyya discuss the history of human responses t...

In the 20th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Jim McClure, General Editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University. Recently, Director McClure spearheaded the creation of a unique digital resource: a repository of Jefferson’s abundant observations of the weather and climate of his time. McClure discusses the creation of the Jefferso...

In the 19th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde discuss their work on a major article in the journal Nature. The article coins a new term – the “History of Climate and Society” (HCS) – to refer to the truly interdisciplinary study of the past impacts of climate change on human populations. It offers a detailed critique of the field as it has been pursued to dat...

In the 18th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Vicki Arroyo, Executive Director of the Georgetown Climate Center and Professor from Practice at Georgetown Law. Professor Arroyo explains which climate policies have worked across the United States, and identifies where emissions reductions will be hardest to achieve. She emphasizes a pressing need for...

In the 17th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview PhD candidate Emily Webster of the Department of History at the University of Chicago. Webster's trailblazing scholarship combines environmental history, the history of science, and medical history to transform understandings of disease in the British Empire. Among other topics, Webster discusses what hi...

In the 16th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview professor Timothy Newfield, a climate historian and historical epidemiologist in the departments of history and biology at Georgetown University. Professor Newfield explains how he landed in two very different departments, in two very different fields, and introduces the discipline of historical epidemio...

In the 15th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Kathryn de Luna, Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University. Professor de Luna combines paleoscience, archaeology, and historical linguistics to explore the deep history of eastern, central and southern Africa before the 20th century. At Georgetown,...

In the 14th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Joseph Manning, the William K. and Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of Classics at Yale University. Professor Manning is a leading expert on the law, politics, and economy of the ancient world, particularly the Hellenistic Period (between 330 and 30 BCE). In recent years, he's led efforts to uncover a li...

In the 13th and most unusual episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde share their reflections on the Covid-19 pandemic in light of their expertise as environmental historians. Among other topics, Degroot and Moesswilde discuss how historians might someday write about the pandemic, the parallels between Covid and climate reporting, and how (and how not) to draw lesso...

In the 12th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview leading tree ring scientists Amy Hessl (West Virginia University) and Valerie Trouet (University of Arizona). Both Hessl and Trouet have scoured the world to measure the growth rings in trees, which they use to uncover ancient climate changes that likely influenced the fate of past societies. In a wide r...

In the 11th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Victoria Herrmann, president and managing director of the Arctic Institute and one of Apolitical's top 100 influencers on climate policy. Dr. Herrmann's scholarship has focused on media representations of the Arctic and its peoples. Yet while completing her PhD as a Gates Scholar in the Scott Polar Insti...

In the tenth episode of Climate History, our podcast, Emma Moesswilde and Dagomar Degroot interview Bathsheba Demuth, assistant professor of environmental history at Brown University. Professor Demuth specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She is a returning guest. In our seventh episode, she introduced the major themes of what was then her doctoral dissertatio...

In the ninth episode of Climate History, our podcast, we relaunch with a new co-host: Emma Moesswilde, PhD Student in Environmental History at Georgetown University. For the relaunch, Moesswilde and Dagomar Degroot are joined by Kevin Anchukaitis, associate professor of geography at the University of Arizona and one of the world's leading paleoclimatologists. Anchukaitis uncovers and interprets pa...

In the eighth episode of the Climate History Podcast, Georgetown PhD candidate Robynne Mellor interviews Professor Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University), the co-director of the Climate History Network, about his new book: "The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720" (Cambridge University Press). Mellor and Degroot discuss the so-called "Little Ic...

In the seventh episode of the Climate History Podcast, Professor Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University) interviews Professor Bathsheba Demuth (Brown University) about her experiences in a changing Arctic, and her forthcoming book on the history of communism and capitalism across the Bering Strait.

In the sixth episode of the Climate History Podcast, Professor Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University) interviews Professor James Fleming (Colby College) about the history and future prospects of geoengineering, and the invention of atmospheric science in the twentieth century.

In the fifth episode of the Climate History Podcast, Professor Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University) interviews Professor Sam White (Ohio State University) about the Trump administration's plans for climate scholarship; his new book on the role of climate change in the colonization of the Americas; and a new Climate History Network project that will map past climate changes and their human conse...

In the fourth episode of the Climate History Podcast, Professor Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University) interviews Professor John McNeill (Georgetown University) about the Anthropocene: the proposed geological epoch in which Earth's environment is most profoundly shaped by humanity.

In the third episode of the Climate History Podcast, Dr. Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University) interviews Dr. Thomas McGovern (CUNY) and Dr. George Hambrecht (University of Maryland) about archaeology in the Arctic and Subarctic. Topics include: the perils of doing fieldwork in the Far North; the struggles of the Norse in Greenland and Iceland at the onset of the Little Ice Age; the threat of cl...

In the second episode of the Climate History Podcast, Dr. Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University) and Dr. Sam White (Ohio State University) discuss the origins and future of their Climate History Network; the prospects for climate history as a discipline; the possibilities and pitfalls of interdisciplinary research; the enduring value of the "Little Ice Age" idea, and more.

In the first episode of the Climate History Podcast, Dr. Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University) interviews Dr. Geoffrey Parker (Ohio State University) about human responses to climatic cooling in the seventeenth century.