Paris and Ice

There have been many attempts to summarise the events that have taken place at the climate talks in Paris in recent weeks so this post will not attempt to do this yet again. For those interested I suggest you visit this link. Instead, I want to draw attention to the work of the scientists who dedicate their research to climate science in the Arctic and Antarctic. As somebody who is interested in environmental history and environmental change their work is of great interest to me as studying ice cores can give us an insight in to the atmospheric make up of past climates and we can then draw up models for how climate may change in the future. Ice core analysis is a scientific reflection of the humanities based environmental history work, which concentrates principally on archival research, as is the convention of professional historical practice. However, the best environmental histories incorporate other methodologies within final papers and climate modeling through ice core analysis exemplifies one set of studies that environmental historians could make use of when writing climate histories.