Suchergebnisse

In the summer of 1999, the Serbian Ministry of Health issued a public health warning about the environmental risks associated with the total solar eclipse to took place on 11 August. The warning contained a list of phantom symptoms unknown to medical profession. Some of these included severe itching, hypertension, cardiac palpitation and frequent urination. Despite the warning's patent absurdity, the Serbian public widely observed it by seeking indoor and underground shelter from the lunar shadow, participating in what I term a 'great public disappearing act'. By contrast, the rest of Europe and the Middle East embraced the event as a public spectacle, with millions thronging the streets and observation posts. This paper raises two key questions: Why did the Serbian government issue the odd warning? And why did the Serbian public observe it? In contrast to the conventional readings of the event as a compound effect of a political manipulation and a lack of public scientific education, I argue that the public behavior on the eclipse day was a meaningful response to the social, political and environmental circumstances in the worn-torn Serbia. Using insights from the social amplification of risk framework, I demonstrate that the great disappearing act was a paradigmatic example of herd behavior governed by the media-driven informational cascades. I further argue that the actors involved in the production and reproduction of phantom ecliptic risks – doctors, journalists, government officials, ordinary citizens – jointly enhanced their plausibility in a way that eventually eliminated the possibility of any behavior not mediated by the cascading processes of risk production.

The medical connotations of winds have been known since antiquity. In the Western tradition, the Hippocratic opus put emphasis on the pathological exposure to winds which were considered as contributing to the so‐called 'atmospheric constitutions', defined by the nature and intensity of the prevailing diseases. While such views continued to inform medical environmentalism well into the modern period, the early colonial encounters with extreme atmospheres brought to attention the extraordinary qualities of the non‐European winds. The winds were individual entities and their pathological agency was associated with geographical origins. The article looks at the period in which such cultural understandings of the wind underwent a profound shift and eventual decline. Owing to the changing public importance of scientific medicine in Victorian Britain, the environmental meanings that had previously coexisted in an epistemic continuum collapsed into a unitary theory that reduced the wind's syncretic pathology to the physical qualities of atmospheric air. The declining interest in medical analyses of windquawind marked the end of a 'colloquial' meteorology and the end of winds as 'natural' kinds endowed with geographical footprints and peculiar 'ways of blowing'.

This paper presents the history of Belgrade numerical weather prediction models as 'assemblages' shaped by the cognitive, social and material circumstances of Tito's Yugoslavia. It looks at how local researchers customized their model to suit the Balkan weather, IBM computers and socialist science policy, and how they managed to 'export' the product internationally. Accommodating the lack of computing power and mountainous topography, the model at first attracted the users with similar concerns. When it was later tested at the US National Meteorological Center, it showed a skill and potential for rapid improvement that led to its implementation in the USA and other national weather services. The success of the Eta model illustrates the ways in which a regional research travels into an 'alien' institutional and cognitive territory and how it bears upon the issues of the production and circulation of technoscientific knowledge. It is argued that the difference between the perceptionsof international 'frontier' technoscience and the local 'backwater' adaptation is that the former implies a representational notion in which what matters is a black-boxed 'fund' of knowledge, while the latter implies an agenda in which what matters is exactly that – what matters locally.

The potential and serious effects of anthropogenic climate change are often communicated through the soundbite that anthropogenic climate change will produce more extreme weather. This soundbite has become popular with scientists and the media to get the public and governments to act against further increases in global temperature and their associated effects through the communication of scary scenarios, what the authors term "atmosfear." Underlying atmosfear's appeal, however, are four premises. First, atmosfear reduces the complexity of climate change to an identifiable target in the form of anthropogenically forced weather extremes. Second, anthropogenically driven weather extremes mandate a responsibility to act to protect the planet and society from harmful and increased risk. Third, achieving these ethical goals is predicated on emissions policies. Fourth, the end result of these policies—a nonanthropogenic climate—is assumed to be more benign than an anthropogenically influenced one. Atmosfear oversimplifies and misstates the true state of the science and policy concerns in three ways. First, weather extremes are only one of the predicted effects of climate change and are best addressed by measures other than emission policies. Second, a preindustrial climate may remain a policy goal, but it is unachievable in reality. Third, the damages caused by any anthropogenically driven extremes may be overshadowed by the damages caused by increased exposure and vulnerability to the future risk. In reality, recent increases in damages and losses due to extreme weather events are due to societal factors. Thus, invoking atmosfear through such approaches as attribution science is not an effective means of either stimulating or legitimizing climate policies.

This paper reviews the long tradition of city-scale climatological and meteorological applications prior to the emergence in the 1990s of early work on the urban/global climate change interface. It shows how 'valuing and seeing the urban' came to be achieved within modern scientific meteorology and how in a limited but significant set of cases that science has contributed to urban practice. The paper traces the evolution of urban climatology since 1950 as a distinct research field within physical geography and meteorology, and its transition from observational monographs to process modelling; reviews the precedents, successful or otherwise, of knowledge transfer from science into public action through climatically aware regulation or design of urban environment; and notes the neglect of these precedents in contemporary climate change discourse—a serious omission.