Dagomar Degroot

"Technology and Climate Change in the Seventeenth Century"

ABSTRACT -- In the thirteenth century, volcanic eruptions and falling solar activity cooled Earth's climate and reshaped its patterns of oceanic and atmospheric circulation. It was the beginning of a "Little Ice Age" that would reach its chilliest point in the seventeenth century. Scientists, historians, and archaeologists have argued that, in society after society, temperature and precipitation extremes shortened or interrupted growing seasons and thereby provoked starvation, outbreaks of epidemic disease, and ultimately violence on a grand scale.

Yet citizens of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic - precursor of the present-day Netherlands - responded creatively to climate change, and so helped their society prosper as many others faltered. Inventors in particular developed or refined technologies that either helped Dutch mariners, soldiers, merchants, and farmers take advantage of opportunities brought about by new climatic realities, or else allowed them to survive otherwise destructive weather. Technological adaptation to natural climate change therefore has a very old history: one that we would be wise to heed today, as we confront the growing crisis of man-made warming.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Dagomar Degroot is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. His work focuses on social responses to extreme environments and extreme environmental changes. His first book, The Frigid Golden Age, was published by Cambridge University Press and named by the Financial Times as one of the ten best history books of 2018. His second book, Civilization and the Cosmos, will explore how environmental changes across the solar system have influenced human history, and is under contract with both Harvard University Press and Penguin Random House. Degroot currently leads teams of scientists, historians, and archaeologists in projects that unearth the resilience of diverse societies to pre-industrial climate changes, and trace the history of shifting animal cultures in the Arctic. His most recent publications focus on the historical relationships between climate change and conflict, especially in the far north. He has been widely interviewed in popular media, including for CNN, Axios, Popular Science, and Space.com, and has written for a broad audience, including for the Washington Post and Aeon Magazine. He is the co-founder of the Climate History Network, an organization of more than 200 scholars of climate change, and HistoricalClimatology.com, a website that receives roughly 500,000 hits per year. You can read about his work at DagomarDegroot.com, or find him on Twitter at @DagomarDegroot.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov