Chaos in the Heavens

Introduction: Ten Theses on Climate Change

1 Christopher Columbus’s True Discovery
‘The trees produce clouds and rain’
The sacred tree of El Hierro
Slavery in a temperate zone

2 Improving the World?
Colonial propaganda
‘Cosmical suspicions’
The sacred tree and the global water cycle

3 The Climate of History
Why did the Romans decline?
The climatic history of the European peoples
Ranking Nations
Countering the encroaching cold

4 The Birth of Historical Climatology
Meteorologists tackle the past
The pitfalls of historical thermometry
The sources of historical climatology

5 An Arsenal in the Indian Ocean
A nature for war
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, or an unconditional eulogy of trees
An energy crisis

6 The Climate of the Revolution
‘Repairing the climate’
‘Compelling the weather to release its prey’
‘The forestry security’
‘Stop, stop that lethal axe’
Napoleon and the water cycle

7 Climate Patriotism
The climate of independence
The climate of improvement

8 In the Shadow of the Volcano
A planetary catastrophe
A providential debacle
Reassuring glaciers
A climate of laissez-faire

9 Should the National Forests be Sold?
Forests, debt, and climate
‘The torch of reason in our sacred woods’
The Revolution’s environmental legacy

10 The Crusades of François-Antoine Rauch
Rauch’s vision: a material, global and divine harmony
Babylon, or the ruins of the future
The bad business of the climate

11 Circular no. 18: An Inquiry into Climate Change from Two
The Ministry of the Interior and of Climate
Deciphering change
Pointers, evidence, and testimony
Scales of change
The forests and climates of the globe
Forgetting the inquiry

12 The Power of Forests
An affront to property
Forestry externalities
Playing on uncertainty
Return to Tacarigua

13 The Horizon Clears
Repairing France: from the sky to the ground
The slow eclipse of the forestry issue
The end of the agricultural ancien régime

14 The Enigmas

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science and technology, previously at Imperial College London, now based in Paris at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the author of The Happy Apocalypse (forthcoming) and The Shock of the Anthropocene (with C. Bonneuil).