American Historical Association annual meeting in Washington, 2-5 January 2014, will again feature several panels on climate history. These will begin with the presidential panel in the opening session: “History, Science, and Climate Change,” with papers by Sam White, Nancy Langston, and David Stahle. On Friday the 3rd there will be a roundtable discussion of Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, including Lauren Benton, Mark Cane, Daniel Headrick, Joseph C. Miller, and a reply by the author. On Saturday the 4th, there will be two panels that unfortunately both run in the 2:30-4:30pm slot: “Before Global Warming: Ideas on Climate Change in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” with Paul Davis, Joe Giacomelli, and Philipp Lehmann and “The Persistent ‘Puzzle of Climate’: Climatic and Microclimatic Challenges to Atlantic Empires,” with Sam White, Thomas Wickman, Michael Hill, and Anya Zilberstein.

Other panels of interest include: “Circumpolar Perspectives on Arctic and Subarctic Environments and Knowledge,” with papers by Andy Bruno, Pey-Yi Chu, Stephen Bocking, Sverker Sörlin, and Andrew Stuhl; “New Directions in Disaster History,” with Michele Landis Dauber, Julia Irwin, and Jacob Remes; “Past Furturework: Histories of Environmental Prediction,” with Roger Turner, Jamie Piertuska, and a paper on climate governance in the Carter administration by Gabriel David Henderson; and “Clashing Claims to Expertise in Environment and Energy Controversies,” with James Henry Bergman, Connemara Doran, Martin Mahony, and Rachel Rothschild.

From the trenches,
Celeste