Luca Scholz (University of Manchester) presents: "Weather Modification in the Longue Durée"

With a response from Federico Cortigiani. See the abstract below: 

"The historiography on weather modification and climate engineering, the study of past schemes to intervene in the Earth’s climate and weather, has a distinctively late modern focus: we have excellent studies for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including of the government-funded projects of the Cold War. Drawing on my current digital historical work on weather shooting, an enduring custom practiced in and beyond Alpine Europe between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, this talk discusses the interest of placing weather modification in a longer historical perspective. To what extent can the popular insistence, ethical concerns, environmental virtues, and epistemic challenges associated with earlier forms of weather modification inform the more recent historiography, as well as a present and future in which human intervention in weather and climate are gaining new appeal?"

Luca Scholz is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in History and Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester. His work combines archival research and computational methods to study the history of weather, information, law, and freedom of movement in early and late modern Europe. He has a strong interest in developing new geospatial and digital methodologies to analyze and question data in historical and humanistic inquiry. His first book Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire was published by Oxford University Press and other writing has appeared in Past & Present, the Historical Journal, Cartographica, and Quaderni Storici. He earned a PhD in History at the European University Institute in Florence and subsequently held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University.