'restore to us the necessary BLIZZARDS' : early twentieth-century visions of climatic change

Abstract

Prompted by Wyndham Lewis’s call in BLAST for a ‘USEFUL LITTLE CHEMIST’ to ‘restore to us the necessary BLIZZARDS’, this paper considers the conceptions of climate and climatic change – natural and anthropogenic – that were in circulation in the early twentieth century. Engaging with the writing of scientists, journalists, novelists, and avant-garde polemicists, it examines early twentieth-century iterations of the notion that climate determines culture, the period’s awareness of past climatic changes, the theories advanced to explain these changes, and the attitudes taken towards the possibility of human-induced climatic change.