Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale by Deborah R. Coen (review)

Deborah Coen, professor of history and chair of Yale's Program in the History of Science and Medicine, has been familiar to scholars of Austrian intellectual history for her work on the Exner family, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty (2007). Her Pfizer Award–winning Climate in Motion is a worthy successor. The volume deftly interweaves the political and social history of Central Europe with the history of science and its cultures, to show how modern climate science came to be.

Austrianists will recognize the book's motto, a Robert Musil quote: "A barometric low hung over the Atlantic" (v). Coen, however, gives it a new face, part of a new "dynamic climatology," an approach to meteorological phenomenon that created a whole new understanding of weather and climate as interactions between the global and the local, geography and those experiencing it. Coen traces how these scientists were trying to make sense of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a body of scientific evidence and personal experience, combining sciences from botany and biology through geography and ethnography, using a frame of reference described by the science term "scaling" (upscaling and downscaling), accounting dynamically for both local and global data.

What distinguished the Austrian/Austro-Hungarian innovations in climate science was the empire's long archive of historical climate data that could be combined with contemporary observations. The goal was understanding the Habsburg territories, both in their particularities and as part of a functioning whole, and its landscape and the people as interacting dynamically, in an ever-changing map of groups and experience. Some early results were practical: a storm-warning project used telegraphy, and Austria hosted the first-ever International Meteorological Congress in 1873 (10–11). Yet more critical was a new paradigm of science itself.

Coen's work has three parts. Part 1, "Unity in Diversity," focuses on the projects underlying this new scientific synthesis that would find many forms, including the Kronprinzenwerk, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Image (1887). Chapter 1 summarizes how data reaching as far back as the Baroque (preserved in weather diaries and almanacs, for instance) connected modern Habsburg scientific culture with its past. Many kinds of records existed: the painter Arcimboldo's famous portraits recorded lifelike images of plants and animals; records tracked tulips "migrating" from the Ottoman Empire in 1562. Provincial museums, such as the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz (36), founded in 1811 and named for collector Archduke Johann (1782–1859), preserved treasured collections of naturalia. Such local data archives were not homogenized but rather encouraged correlations across regions in Landeskunde.

Chapter 2, "The Austrian Idea," tracks how institutions furthered projects on ethnography, art history, and climatology (51). Importantly, the Empire collected data from all over its regions, thus foregrounding ethnic diversity, migration, and hybridity of the Empire's species and people (52). Such presentations highlighted regional flows and circulations, not histories, and demanded that data be studied in context. This chapter is critical for understanding Adalbert Stifter's Freiherr von Risach in Nachsommer, as it addresses the Vienna School of Art History and historical preservation projects. Chapter 3, "The Imperial-Royal Scientist," amplifies how these professionals balanced locally observed facts into ever-changing models of the whole. To facilitate this work, new disciplines like physical geography arose, as did new organizations and networks (e. g., the Akademie der Wissenschaften, founded in 1847, and the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geomagnetismus, founded in 1851). The Austrian/Austro-Hungarian institutions and research stations built an Empire-wide network of scientists engaged in collecting and correlating local data to interrogate and reformulate laws that were less universal than großräumig, large-scale.

Part 2, "The Scales of Empire," tracks how problems of scale—local and global, which intersect as dynamic systems—became central projects for new sciences and new communities of knowledge. Chapter 5 shows uses of cartography and geography in all their forms (including ethnography and physical...