Climate and beyond

Knowledge Production about Planet Earth and the Global Environment as Indicators of Social Change

January 23rd – 25th, 2013, University of Bern

Venue

University of Bern, Main Building
Room 120, First Floor
Hochschulstrasse 4
3012 Bern

Programme

January 23rd, 2013
14:00	Opening: Fortunat Joos (Oeschger Centre, Univ. Bern, CH)
	Introduction: Christian Rohr (Univ. Bern, CH) and Andrea Westermann (Univ. Zurich, CH)
Session 1	Coping with Tectonic and Climatic Hazards
	Chair: Stefan Brönnimann (Univ. Bern, CH)
14:20	Erhard Oeser (Univ. Vienna, AT): The Development of the Wave Theory and its Application to Earthquakes. The Paradigm Shift at the end of the 19th century
14:55	Kerry Smith (Brown Univ., Providence, USA): Making Disasters Natural: Seismology and Prediction Regimes in Modern Japan (PDF, 29 KB)
15:30	Conevery Bolton Valencius (Univ. Massachusetts, Boston, USA): Fracking and Seismic History in the Contemporary United States (PDF, 42 KB)
16:05	Coffee break
16:20	Brian Rumsey (Univ. Kansas, Lawrence, USA): The Application of Methods of Probability to the Prediction of Floods in the USA (late 19th c. to the 1970s) (PDF, 8 KB)
16:55	End of Session 1
19:00	Public keynote lecture and Apéro (Aula, Main Building, Univ. Bern)
	Naomi Oreskes (Univ. California, San Diego, USA): When Knowledge is not Power: Science, Technology and the Environment in the 21st Century
	Apéro
January 24th, 2013
Session 2	Global Resources and Knowledge Production
	Chair: Gunter Stephan (Univ. Bern, CH)
09:00	Andrea Westermann (Univ. Zurich, CH): Supplying the 20th century: How a steady flow of industrial raw materials was developed and how geologists helped create it (PDF, 8 KB)
09:35	Perrin Selcer (Univ. Texas, Austin, USA): Fabricating Unity: The FAO-UNESCO Soil Map of the World (PDF, 10 KB)
10:10	Christian Kehrt (Helmut Schmidt Univ., Hamburg, DE): Gondwana's Promises. German Geologists in Antarctica between Basic Science and Resource Exploration in the Late 1970s (PDF, 14 KB)
10:45	Coffee break
Session 3	Arctic Research: Scientific, Economic and Social impact
	Chair: Christian Pfister (Univ. Bern, CH)
11:00	Ronald E. Doel (Florida State Univ., Tallahassee, USA): What Really Mattered in the Arctic? Military Patronage and the Pursuit of Environmental Knowledge during the Early Cold War (PDF, 45 KB)
	Lecture of Matthias Heymann (Aarhus Univ., DK): Investigating Arctic Environments: The Role of Greenland in the Early Cold War (PDF, 10 KB) given by Ronald E. Doel
12:00	Anna Carlsson-Hyslop (Lancaster Univ., UK): Knowledge Production about Coastal Flooding in Britain, 1919–1959: How and why (PDF, 53 KB)
cancelled	Alexandra M. Avdonina (Vladimir, RUS): Social Transformation in the Russian Far North in Connection with Discoveries in Geosciences (PDF, 10 KB)
12:45	Lunch
Session 4	Earth and Climate Governance
	Chair: Joachim Radkau (Univ. Bielefeld, DE)
14:15	Naomi Oreskes (Univ. California, San Diego, USA): How the Earth Sciences Became a Social Science (and Why It Matters)
14:50	Ola Uhrqvist (Linköping Univ., SE): Mentalities enabling Earth System modelling in GAIM and AIMES (PDF, 13 KB)
15:25	Elena Aronova (MPI for History of Science, Berlin, DE): Knowledge of the Globe and Global Politics: The "Global Network for Environmental Monitoring" Project in the 1960s–1970s (PDF, 28 KB)
16:00	Coffee break
	Chair: Monika Gisler (ETH Zurich, CH)
16:15	Matthias Dörries (Univ. Strasbourg, FR): Politics, deep time, and the future (PDF, 10 KB)
16:50	Christoph Rosol (MPI for History of Science, Berlin, D): Extremely Noisy and Incredibly Close. Reconstructing Deep-time Climate Change as a Means to Define the Present (PDF, 8 KB)
17:30	End of Session 4
19:30 h	Conference Dinner (Hotel Kreuz)
January 25th, 2013
Session 5	Empires, European Experts and the Sciences of the Earth
	Chair: Iris Schröder (TU Braunschweig, DE)
09:00	Ryan Tucker Jones (Idaho State Univ., Pocatello, USA): Empire and Revolution in Peter Simon Pallas's Betrachtungen über die Beschaffenheit der Gebürge (PDF, 10 KB)
09:35	Lorena B. Valderrama (Univ. Valencia, ES): European Experts, Earthquake Knowledge Transfer and the Institutionalization of Seismology. The Case of Chile (PDF, 10 KB)
10:10	Coffee break
10:25	Bernhard C. Schär (ETH Zurich, CH): Earth Scientists as Time Travellers and Agents of Social Change in the Colonial Era: An Example from Basel (PDF, 12 KB)
11:00	Philipp N. Lehmann (Havard Univ., Cambridge, USA): The Threat of the Desert: Debates on Climate Change in the Late Nineteenth Century (PDF, 61 KB)
Conclusions
11:35	Christian Rohr (Univ. Bern, CH): Synthesis
12:05	Final discussion
13:00	Snack buffet
14:30	City of Bern guided tour

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