Deborah
Coen

Scientists and policy makers typically think about the consequences of climate change in terms of discrete local ‘impacts’ that are extrapolated from global models. Implicit is the assumption that change begins on the global level, setting the parameters to which local communities must reactively adapt. What’s missing from this framework are the humble drivers of change that unfold at the scale of everyday life and grow bottom-up rather than top-down. Scientists working at the nexus of atmospheric science, ecology, and public health have recently produced evidence that Earth’s climate depends on biological processes that modify the atmosphere from the ground up. Climate models have ‘limited scale awareness’, meaning that they are insensitive to feedbacks between long-term, planetary-scale warming and rapid, local fluctuations of trace constituents of the atmosphere. How plants fare as the climate warms will have cascading consequences for the quality of the air we breathe. This means that local land-use decisions matter at every scale, even as their consequences can’t be foreseen with certainty. This presentation seeks to contribute to the imagination of grassroots transformative change by assembling a history of ‘atmospheric influence’, the science of the atmosphere as a medium of communication and connection.

Deborah R. Coen is a historian of science whose research focuses on the modern physical and environmental sciences and on central European intellectual and cultural history. She earned an A.B. in Physics from Harvard, an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard, where she was also a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. Before coming to Yale, she taught for ten years in the History Department at Barnard College and was Director of Research Clusters for the Columbia Center for Science and Society. At Yale she is also a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.

One of the questions driving Professor Coen’s research is how scientists cope with uncertainty. Her first book, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (2007), centered on an extraordinary scientific dynasty, the Exner-Frisch family. Contrary to typical accounts of fin-de-siècle central Europe, the Exners reveal a strain of Austrian liberalism that was (literally) at home with modernist subjectivity and uncertainty. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty won the Susan Abrams Prize from the University of Chicago Press, the Barbara Jelavich Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Book Prize. Professor Coen has pursued her interest in the history of private life in articles such as ‘The Common World: Histories of Science and Domestic Intimacy’, Modern Intellectual History 11 (2014): 417-438.

Professor Coen’s recent research has explored the production of environmental knowledge. In 2013 she published The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter, which examines seismology’s history as a form of ‘citizen science’. In the nineteenth century, standing networks of seismic observers transformed earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of human behavior and planetary physics. The Earthquake Observers was a finalist for the Turku Book Prize from the European Society for Environmental History; click here to read a review in The Times Higher Education or The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Her latest book is Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (2018), winner of the 2019 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the history of science. Climate in Motion is the first study of the science of climate dynamics before the computer age. Professor Coen argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales of space and time, in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a bricolage of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Climate in Motion grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization.

Maria Dębińska, Magdalena Krysztoforska, Julia Sánchez-Dorado, Ben Woodard

• At the venue (registration required): Registration opens on 6 May 2025.

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Image Credit © Maria Dębińska