This article offers an exploratory quantitative analysis of the conceptual career of climate in US English over the period 1800–2010. Our aim is to qualify two, closely related arguments circulating in Environmental Humanities scholarship regarding the concept's history, namely that we only started to think of climate as a global entity after the introduction of general circulation models during the final quarter of the twentieth century, and, second, that climatic change only became an issue of environmental concern once scientists began to approach climate as a global model. While we do not dispute that the computer revolution resulted in a significantly new understanding of climate, our analysis points to a longer process of singularization and growing abstraction starting in the early nineteenth century that might help to nuance and deepen insights developed in environmental history.
Michael Boyden is chair professor of English and American Literature and Culture at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. E-mail: michael.boyden@ru.nl
Ali Basirat is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Computer and Information Science at Linköping University, Sweden. E-mail: ali.basirat@liu.se
Karl Berglund is associate professor in Literature and research coordinator at the Centre for Digital Humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden. E-mail: karl.berglund@abm.uu.se