Climate History Podcast

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 collaboration between disciplines, and what they may be revealing about today's climate crisis. He also describes the most important themes in the last millennium of climate change in Europe - and why it is so important that scholars introduce their methods, models, and sources to a broad audience.

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 ranging conversation, Trouet and Hessl describe the nature of this work and its key lessons for the present. Trouet also introduces her new book, "Tree Story," which chronicles her career and explains the basics of tree ring science to the general public.

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 climate change to the archaeological record of northern peoples; and the possibilities (and challenges) of interdisciplinary approaches to Arctic research.

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 dissertation, and is now her book, "Floating Coast." In this episode, she describes how she wrote the book, and what we can learn from it. She details her experiences in the Arctic, her deep engagement with the community of Old Crow, her thinking about non-human actors in historical stories, her success in writing for the general public, and her views on what the past can reveal about the future of the rapidly-warming Arctic.​

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 Ice Age;" the contrasting experiences of different societies; resilience and adaptation in the face of climate change; the keys to getting a job in environmental history, and the culture shock of moving from Canada to the United States.