




































 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 49 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whither Climatology? 

Brückner’s Climate Oscillations, Data Debates, and Dynamic 

Climatology 
 

 

Philipp N. Lehmann 

plehmann@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de 

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin 

 

 

In 1890 Eduard Brückner published his major climatological work with the wordy title 

Climate Oscillations Since 1700, With Remarks About Climate Oscillations Since the 

Diluvial Epoch.
1
 The book brought a new impetus to the ongoing debate about climatic 

changes and variability, which had been a major point of contention in the climatological 

community throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Brückner’s postulation 

of periodic and global 35-year climatic cycles made a large and lasting impact. Among 

many others, Svante Arrhenius discussed the findings; and more than half a century later, 

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie used Brückner’s data collection as important material for his 

own work in climate history.
2
 The research and writing of the book, however, had not 

been an easy task for Brückner. In the foreword, he professed that the completion of the 

work “had been forced to be delayed again and again.”
3
  

Even a cursory reading of Climate Oscillations suffices to reveal the likely cause 

for the difficulties: in order to bolster his claims of persistent universal climatic cycles, 

Brückner had to cover large evidentiary ground. On the basis of information on glacial 

                                                   
1
 Eduard Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, nebst Bemerkungen über die Klimaschwankungen der 

Diluvialzeit, Geographische Abhandlungen 4 (Vienna: Ed. Hölzel, 1890); unless otherwise indicated, all 

translations into English are my own. 
2
 See: Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch, “Der Klimaforscher Eduard Brückner,” in Eduard Brückner - Die 

Geschichte unseres Klimas: Klimaschwankungen und Klimafolgen, ed. by Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch 

(Vienna: Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik, 2008), 7; Arrhenius directly referred to 

Brückner’s work in his 1903 textbook on “cosmic physics”: Svante Arrhenius, Lehrbuch der kosmischen 

Physik (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1903), 570–571; for Ladurie’s early and groundbreaking work on climate 

history, see: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (Paris: Flammarion, 1967); the 

English version was published as: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History 

of Climate Since the Year 1000 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971). 
3
 Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, iii; English versions of some of Brückner’s writings on climate 

change and climate variability can be found in: Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, eds., Eduard Brückner: 

The Sources and Consequences of Climate Change and Climate Variability in Historical Times (Dordrecht: 

Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). 

mailto:plehmann@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de


 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 50 
 

 

 

oscillations and the historical fluctuations of water levels in bodies of water, he had first 

presented a general outline of his ideas in 1887.
4
 Two years later, Brückner had already 

added not only quantitative temperature and precipitation data from Scottish Arbroath to 

Australian Sydney, but also historical records of European vintage dates.
5
 In his 1890 

book, he then brought the full collection of his evidence to bear: he discussed reports and 

theories of climatic changes around the world, appended historical information on the 

frequency of cold winters and ice conditions on bodies of water, and correlated 

meteorological information with changes in agricultural production and the incidence of 

typhus. 

What interests me in this paper is not a detailed analysis of Brückner’s ambitious, 

if ultimately flawed, theory of climate cycles, but the fact that his book represented an 

exemplary embodiment of a particular approach in the then still young and inchoate field 

of climatology. The nineteenth-century version of the study of climates was not – or at 

least not only – the often-satirized prime example of narrow-minded, statistical drudgery, 

but a more complex and heterogeneous “science of the archive,” marked by the use of 

diverse sources of quantitative and qualitative evidence to form a holistic representation 

of climatic conditions throughout history.
6
 With this approach, climatological work 

revealed its close connections – both programmatic and institutional – to the “telluric,” or 

earth-bound, sciences of geography and geology, which had similarly long historical 

dimensions, combined approaches from diverse fields, and shared a common interest in 

the phenomena of glaciations and their aftermaths.  

The inductive, historical, and archive-based method of studying patterns in the 

climate confronted practitioners with problems arising from the heterogeneous and 

increasingly capacious data sets. Meteorological networks were expanding around the 

globe, supplying more and more numerical data on rainfall, temperature, and winds. At 

the same time climatologists – a designation I use as an umbrella term for scientists of all 

stripes working on climatic phenomena – also continued to uncover historical sources 

offering evidence of past climatic conditions. Faced with this wealth of diverse data, 

some practitioners in the meteorological and climatological communities started to both 

criticize the lack of common standards in data selection and evaluation and bemoan the 

dearth of convincing explanatory models for climatic phenomena. As I will show in this 

paper, the internal criticism led some practitioners to call for new deductive approaches 

and more narrowly defined data sets, increasingly drawn not from around, but from 

above, the earth and focusing on atmospheric dynamics rather than historical and 

geographic information. As Deborah Coen has described in her work, moves towards 

physical-dynamic approaches to the study of climates were already apparent before the 

First World War.
7
 By the 1920s, some of the appeals for a reevaluation of the discipline 

                                                   
4
 Eduard Brückner, “Die Schwankungen des Wasserstandes im Kaspischen Meer, dem Schwarzen Meer 

und der Ostsee in ihrer Beziehung zur Witterung,” Annalen der Hydrographie und Maritimen Meteorologie 

16, no. 2 (1888): 55–67. 
5
 Eduard Brückner, In wie weit ist das heutige Klima konstant? Vortrag gehalten auf dem 8. Deutschen 

Geographentage zu Berlin (Berlin: W. Pormetter, 1889). 
6
 The term “science of the archive” is borrowed from: Lorraine Daston, “The Sciences of the Archive,” 

Osiris 27, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 156–187. 
7
 See, in particular, the case studies of Heinrich von Ficker and Aleksandr Ivanovitch Voeikov in: Deborah 

R. Coen, “Imperial Climatographies From Tyrol to Turkestan,” Osiris 26 (2011): 45–65. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 51 
 

 

 

cited new developments in dynamic meteorology, and particularly Vilhelm Bjerknes’ 

approaches to weather prediction, as a model for a future “dynamic climatology.”  

While climatology continued to be a field of many diverse approaches and 

methods and remained a long way from becoming the atmospheric and physical science it 

is today, it had entered a period of reevaluation and uncertainty with regard to the future 

trajectory of the discipline. Critiques of data practices and calls for a general re-

envisioning of the content and methods of climatological research challenged the 

powerful historico-geographical tradition of the field. The ensuing debate formed one 

particular aspect of the complex dynamics of disciplinary specialization and of larger 

epistemological debates about the definition of the human versus the natural sciences at 

the turn of the twentieth century.
8
 As “natural historians,” climatologists were caught in 

between the two sides, having to negotiate the deepening distinctions that academics and 

their institutions began to draw between inductive and deductive, and idiographic and 

nomothetic, approaches.
9
 Climatology, straddling the fields of meteorology, physics, 

geology, geography, and history, incorporated many different methods and data sets, 

which led not only to a rich inter-disciplinary dimension of the work, but also to 

difficulties with data heterogeneity and data overload and, ultimately, to arguments about 

the future trajectory of the field.
10

 

In this paper, I will first discuss Eduard Brückner’s use of evidence in his Climate 

Oscillations before examining the larger discussions in the field over what kind of data 

and what kind of disciplinary approaches would be considered feasible and valid in 

climatological work. Finally, I will briefly outline the early influence of dynamic 

meteorology on some of the attempts to imagine a new kind of physical and dynamic 

climate science. Through this history of data debates and methodological critique, I will 

draw out some of the origins and implications of the period of disciplinary reevaluation 

up to 1930. 

 

Eduard Brückner’s Climate Oscillations 

 

Eduard Brückner was born in Jena in 1863 to the German-Russian historian Alexander 

and his wife. He spent most of his childhood and early teenage years in Russia, before his 

parents sent him to Karlsruhe to finish his secondary school education. After receiving 

his diploma, Brückner went on to study geology, geography, paleontology, physics, and 

history at the universities of Dorpat (Tartu in modern-day Estonia), Dresden, and Munich. 

As a doctorate student in Munich, he became one of the first advisees of the young 

                                                   
8
 For a discussion of the connected histories and the historiographical separation of the humanities and the 

sciences, see the articles in the recent Isis focus section organized and introduced by Rens Bod and Julia 

Kursell: Rens Bod and Julia Kursell, “Introduction: The Humanities and the Sciences,” Isis 106, no. 2 (June 

1, 2015): 337–340; for a case study of the differences between historical and atmospheric approaches in 

late nineteenth-century Norway, see Gunnar Ellingsen’s contribution in this volume. 
9
 Cf.: Lynn K. Nyhart, “Wissenschaft and Kunde: The General and the Special in Modern Science,” Osiris 

27, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 253; for the locus classicus of the distinction between nomothetic and 

idiographic approaches, see: Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft (Strassburg: Heitz, 

1894). 
10

 On the long history of information and data overload, see: Brian W. Ogilvie, “The Many Books of 

Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 

(2003): 29–40; Daniel Rosenberg, “Early Modern Information Overload,” Journal of the History of Ideas 

64, no. 1 (2003): 1–9. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 52 
 

 

 

Albrecht Penck (1858-1945), who in his mid-twenties had already become famous for his 

glaciological work. Continuing along some of his advisor’s lines of research, Brückner 

wrote his 1885 dissertation on the glaciation of the Salzach area in Austria. United by 

their common interests, Brückner and Penck would become frequent and prolific 

collaborators. Their joint work culminated in the three-volume study Die Alpen im 

Eiszeitalter (“The Alps During the Glacial Epoch”), whose final tome appeared in 1909.
11

 

Almost twenty-five years before this publication, Brückner had started his academic 

career at the Deutsche Seewarte – a governmental institute for maritime meteorology led 

by the climatologist Wladimir Köppen. It was there in Hamburg that Brückner developed 

his first preliminary hypothesis of climate cycles, which grew out of his observations of 

ongoing glacial oscillations with short periodicities. In 1888, he took up a professorship 

at the university in Bern and continued his climatological and glaciological work. After a 

short stint at the university of Halle from 1904 to 1906, Brückner became Albrecht 

Penck’s successor at the university of Vienna, where he would stay and work until the 

end of his life in 1927. 

Brückner’s studies on climate oscillations – and indeed the development of 

nineteenth-century climatology as a whole – have to be placed in the context of 

disciplinary debates. When Brückner shifted his focus from glaciers to the less 

demarcated subject of “climate” in the 1880s, he joined an assorted assembly of 

practitioners with different disciplinary backgrounds and different approaches to the field. 

While the study of climatic phenomena already had a long history at that point, 

“climatology” was an emergent academic discipline in the late nineteenth century.
12

 Its 

practitioners worked in the fields of geography, geology, and meteorology – disciplines 

that were themselves still in the process of finding a distinct identity in institutional 

academia.
13

 One of the leading voices in the growing climatological community of the 

late nineteenth century was the Austrian Julius Hann, who authored the first large 

climatological textbook, in which he provided the often-cited definition of climate as the 

“mean condition of the atmosphere in a particular place at the surface of the earth.”
14

 

While this 1883 description explicitly included the dimension of the atmosphere, both the 

local character of climate – its “particular place” – and the focus on the lowest strata of 

the atmosphere were central to the definition.  

Hann’s definition was by no means the only one at the time. “Climate” implied 

diverse parameters and disciplinary connections among the variety of geologists, 

                                                   
11

 Albrecht Penck and Eduard Brückner, Die Alpen im Eiszeitalter, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1909). 
12

 For a recent overview article of the study of climates before the nineteenth century, see: Jean-Baptiste 

Fressoz and Fabien Locher, “L’Agir humain sur le climat et la naissance de la climatologie historique, 

XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 62, no. 1 (2015): 48–78. 
13

 On the history of disciplinary formation in the nineteenth century, see for instance: David Cahan, ed., 

From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 2003); on the development of the discipline of geography in Germany, see: 

Hans-Dietrich Schultz, Die deutschsprachige Geographie von 1800 bis 1970: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte 

ihrer Methodologie (Berlin: Selbstverlag des Geographischen Instituts der Freien Universität Berlin, 1980). 
14

 Julius von Hann, Handbuch der Klimatologie (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorn, 1883), 1; for the English version, 

see: Julius von Hann, Handbook of Climatology, trans. by Robert DeCourcy Ward (London: Macmillan, 

1903); it is not without irony that Hann, who explicitly conceived of climatology as an auxiliary science to 

meteorology, was one of the most important figures in the disciplinary consolidation of the field. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 53 
 

 

 

botanists, medical doctors, colonial geographers, and others who worked with the term.
15

 

Alexander von Humboldt’s 1845 description of climate as “changes [or “changeable 

parameters”] in the atmosphere that affect our organs in discernable ways” was still a 

frequently cited point of reference in the late nineteenth century, although by that time its 

practical significance was largely limited to the sub-field of medical meteorology.
16

 

Hann’s definition, by contrast, was an attempt to distill the essence of the eclectic 

climatological work of the time. Still echoing Aristotelian conceptions, Hann described 

“climate” as a characteristic of a certain region and thus a feature of its geography. He 

also drew parallels to common geographic approaches by describing climatology as 

“more descriptive” compared to meteorology, which he deemed closer to the physical 

sciences.
17

 Most nineteenth-century authors of climatological studies were indeed trained 

in the telluric fields of geology and geography. This common career trajectory was at 

least partly due to both questions of climatic changes arising from the geological debates 

about ice ages around the middle of the nineteenth century and the blossoming of 

geographical approaches in the context of a renewed imperial impulse in Europe around 

the same time.
18

 Brückner himself combined his geological and geographical training in 

his ongoing work on glaciology, and he published his Climate Oscillations in a series of 

“Geographical Treatises” by the Vienna publishing house of Eduard Hölzel.  

Although the book caused a stir in the climatological community, it was not a 

deus ex machina that suddenly introduced the issue of climatic instability and climatic 

variations to the field. Brückner was taking part in one of the defining debates of 

climatology in the late nineteenth century – especially among the active Germanophone 

community of practitioners.
19

 Even in the early article version of the book – revealingly 

                                                   
15

 On the historical complexity of the term and the concept of “climate,” see: James Rodger Fleming and 

Vladimir Jankovic, “Introduction: Revisiting Klima,” Osiris 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 1–15; on the same 

topic, see also James Rodger Fleming’s contribution in this special issue. 
16

 Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 

1845), 340; see also: Karl-Heinz Bernhardt, “Alexander von Humboldts Auffassung vom Klima und sein 

Beitrag zur Einrichtung von meteorologischen Stationsnetzen,” Zeitschrift für Meteorologie 34, no. 4 

(1984): 213–217; Karl-Heinz Bernhardt, “Alexander von Humboldts Beitrag zu Entwicklung und 

Institutionalisierung von Meteorologie und Klimatologie im 19. Jahrhundert,” Algorismus no. 41 (2003): 

195–221. 
17

 Hann, Handbuch der Klimatologie, 3. 
18

 On the intellectual origins and the development of the ice age theory, see: Martin J. S. Rudwick, Worlds 

Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 2008), chap. 13, 34–36; Tobias Krüger, Discovering the Ice Ages: International Reception and 

Consequences for a Historical Understanding of Climate (Leiden: Brill, 2013); John Imbrie and Katherine 

Palmer Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 19–57; on the 

imperial context of the rise and formation of geography as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, 

see: David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise 

(Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 216–259; Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of 

Exploration and Empire (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2001); Sebastian Lentz and Ferjan Ormeling, 

eds., Die Verräumlichung des Welt-Bildes: Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen zwischen 

“explorativer Geographie” und der “Vermessenheit” europäischer Raumphantasien. (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 

2008). 
19

 For some central documents from this debate, see: Theobald Fischer, Studien über das Klima der 

Mittelmeerländer, Ergänzungsheft zu Petermanns Geographischen Mitteilungen 58 (Gotha: J. Perthes, 

1879); Franz von Czerny, Die Veränderlichkeit des Klimas und ihre Ursachen (Vienna: A. Hartleben, 

1881); Theobald Fischer, “Zur Frage der Klima-Änderung im südlichen Mittelmeergebiet und in der 

nördlichen Sahara,” Petermanns Mitteilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt 29 (1883): 1–4; 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 54 
 

 

 

entitled “In How Far is Today’s Climate Stable?” – Brückner emphasized that his 

contribution was to be seen against the background of the debate on climate change and 

variation in historic times – a debate that was directly questioning the definition of 

climates as stable, long-term averages of atmospheric conditions.
20

 Indeed, Brückner 

believed that he had solved the issue by showing that the apparent unidirectional or 

progressive changes of climate that his colleagues identified were simply the up or, 

alternatively, the down of one climatological cycle.
21

 His work was nevertheless neither 

the beginning nor the end of the debate, as variability continued to be one of the defining 

objects of climatological investigation. Despite Hann’s insistence of climatology as a 

science of averages and means, even the Handbook author himself – just like Alexander 

von Humboldt before him – took changes and variations to be defining characteristics of 

climates.
22

 This gave another impetus to researchers attempting to identify weather 

anomalies and their relation to larger processes of climatic change.
23

  

The research into climatic variability posed serious challenges to climate 

scientists in the late nineteenth century. The network of meteorological stations was fast 

expanding around the globe, but the stations could only provide data series for certain 

parameters, like precipitation and temperature, and covered limited time periods.
24

 For 

any information on the past conditions of climates – so vital for the debates on climatic 

changes – practitioners had to turn to alternative sources, which often included textual 

evidence from past centuries, eyewitness accounts, and any kind of material sources that 

promised information on past environmental conditions. With its collection from vintage 

date records to descriptions of harsh winters, Brückner’s work was thus an outstanding 

example of the eclectic climatological approach of the time, still praised forty years later 

for its use of diverse datasets to shed light on climatic conditions before the existence of 

reliable meteorological records.
25

   

The inclusion of all kinds of different data in climate studies, however, was not a 

response born solely of necessity. Rather, it was in accordance with the tradition of 

nineteenth-century geography to combine the available quantitative information with 

                                                                                                                                                        

Joseph Partsch, “Über den Nachweis einer Klimaänderung der Mittelmeerländer in geschichtlicher Zeit,” in 

Verhandlungen des VIII. deutschen Geographentages (Berlin: W. Pormetter, 1889), 116–125; see also: 

Moritz Flügel, Nico Stehr, and Hans von Storch, “The 19th Century Discussion of Climate Variability and 

Climate Change: Analogies for the Present Debate?,” World Resource Review 7, no. 4 (1995): 589–605. 
20

 Brückner, In wie weit ist das heutige Klima konstant?, 101. 
21

 Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, 288–289. 
22

 In the third edition of Hann’s handbook, the part about climatic variability made up more than 40 pages 

and included discussions of the theories of Brückner, Arrhenius, and James Croll, among others; see: Julius 

von Hann, Handbuch der Klimatologie, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorn, 1908), 345–388. 
23

 Cf.: Deborah R. Coen, “Climate and Circulation in Imperial Austria,” The Journal of Modern History 82, 

no. 4 (December 1, 2010): 846. 
24

 See: Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 2005); on the development of nineteenth-century meteorological observation 

in Europe and, in particular, in France, see: Fabien Locher, Le savant et la tempête: étudier l’atmosphère et 

prévoir le temps au XIXe siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008); on the development of 

meteorological observations in Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see: Klaus Wege, Die 

Entwicklung der meteorologischen Dienste in Deutschland (Offenbach am Main: Deutscher Wetterdienst, 

2002); see also: James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford 

University Press, 1998), 33–44. 
25

 See, for example: Karl Knoch, Klima und Klimaschwankungen (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1930), 124–

125. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 55 
 

 

 

qualitative sources – and natural scientific with humanistic evidence – to achieve a 

holistic representation of the Ganzheit, or the “whole,” of the landscape or region in 

question. 26  This holistic approach was also evident in Brückner’s work. In Climate 

Oscillations, he presented his diverse data in the form of text, tables, and graphs. While 

detailed descriptions of datasets were still the norm in climatological writing – a practice 

that the lengthy Climate Oscillations exemplified – Brückner also increasingly used 

visual representations to bring across his points. In his data tables, he showcased the 

impressive chronological and thematic range of his evidence – in one example, and on 

one single page, presenting his use of data of grave harvest dates, the frequencies of cold 

winters, and ice conditions in rivers, lakes, and glaciers in Europe over a period of nearly 

nine hundred years (Fig. 1). To visualize the climatic oscillations and to highlight their 

global extent beyond the European continent, Brückner used line-graphs that showed the 

fairly synchronous ups and downs of the climatic cycles on different continents and a 

curve for the “entire earth” produced by the averaging of local numerical data (Fig. 2). 

With his use of line graphs, Brückner also attempted to demonstrate the regularity and 

wave-like characteristics of the climatic fluctuations (Schwankungen), a term he used 

interchangeably with the loanword “oscillations” (Oszillationen) from the physical 

sciences. 

 

                                                   
26

 See: Geoffrey J. Martin and T. S. Martin, All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas, 4th ed. 

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7–8; for an account of the subjects and methods of nineteenth-

century geography, see: R. D. Dikshit, Geographical Thought: A Contextual History of Ideas (New Delhi: 

Prentice-Hall of India, 1997); as Dikshit argues on pp. 63-65, geography itself underwent a “crisis of 

identity” in the late nineteenth century, as its holistic methods came into conflict with a more general move 

towards disciplinary specialization; for a discussion of the notion of “unity” in German geographical 

thought, see: Richard Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the 

Light of the Past (Lancaster: Association of American Geographers, 1949), 264–267. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 56 
 

 

 

 
 

Fig. 1: “Secular oscillations of the climate represented by the oscillations of the grape harvest, the 

frequency of cold winters, and the ice conditions in rivers, lakes, and glaciers,” 

representing data from 1020 to 1890 (Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, 271). 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 57 
 

 

 

 
 

Fig. 2: “Regular secular oscillations of rainfall sorted by continent and as a mean for the entire 

earth” representing data from 1831-1885 (Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, 171). 

 

In other aspects of his work, however, Brückner looked to different disciplines for 

inspiration. His holistic approach to the study of climate explicitly included social, 

economic, and political dimensions. He introduced his 1889 presentation with a reference 

to the “deep impact” that climatic changes would have on “the entire existence and 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 58 
 

 

 

activities of mankind.”
27

 He then spent three of the remaining thirteen pages discussing 

the potential impact of climatic variations on agriculture and economy, correlating 

climatic cycles with cycles in production and trade.
28

 In the book version and a following 

article, Brückner repeated the concerns, deepening the discussion of a correlation 

between climatic and economic cycles.
29  

This correlation had been the subject of a 

number of articles in the late eighteenth century, among them notable contributions by 

the economist William Stanley Jevons.
30

 And the topic would continue to be of interest in 

the early twentieth century, when the geographer and climatologist Ellsworth Huntington 

wrote on “climatic variations and economic cycles” after reading Brückner's work.
31

  

Going beyond the question of economic cycles, Brückner also widened the extent 

of his analysis by including discussions of the particular vulnerability of arid regions to 

climatic fluctuations and the observed influence of climate variations on the frequency of 

disease.
32

 The scope of Brückner’s work was large, both in its use of diverse kinds of data 

from around the world and its explicit connections to human concerns. Climate, for him, 

was not just a physical phenomenon to be described by scientists, but a powerful force 

with deep socio-economic and cultural repercussions. Nineteenth-century climatology – 

just like the Victorian meteorology that Katharine Anderson has described in detail – 

displayed a marked “emphasis on the integration of culture.”
33

 

 

Data Debates 

 

The inclusive approach of Brückner’s work was not out of the ordinary in nineteenth-

century climatological studies. In fact, the eclectic methods to gather historical 

information from various sources were part of the familiar methodology of the 

Altertumswissenschaften, or classical studies, upon which European university education 

was built. As diverse as the views of different practitioners were, they shared the 

common vocabulary of the Greek and Latin canon and were accustomed to working with 

Hilfswissenschaften, or “auxiliary sciences,” that could provide the evidence and data to 

allow glimpses of the distant past beyond the relatively short records of standardized, 

quantitative data from meteorological stations (see, for instance, the limited chronological 

scope of rainfall data in Fig. 2).  
                                                   
27

 Brückner, In wie weit ist das heutige Klima konstant?, 101: “Solche [Klimaänderungen] aber könnten 

nicht ohne den tiefgehendsten Einfluss auf das ganze Leben und Treiben des Menschengeschlchts bleiben.” 
28

 Ibid., 110–112. 
29

 Eduard Brückner, “Der Einfluß der Klimaschwankungen auf die Ernteerträge und Getreidepreise in 

Europa,” Geographische Zeitschrift 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1895): 39–51. 
30

 For Jevons’ work on the sunspot-commerce correlation, see among other articles: William Stanley Jevons, 

“Commercial Crises and Sun-Spots,” Nature 19, no. 472 (1878): 33–37; William Stanley Jevons, “The 

Solar Commercial Cycle,” Nature 26 (1882): 226–228; Brückner referred to William Stanley Jevons’ work 

on trade and business cycles, but refuted all correlation between the 35-year climate cycle and sunspot 

variation; see: Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, 289, 292, 301–302, 324; on the role of the sunspot 

debate in the development of statistics, see: Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-

1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 274–278. 
31

 Ellsworth Huntington, “Climatic Variations and Economic Cycles,” Geographical Review 1, no. 3 

(1916): 192–202. 
32

 Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, 272–283. 
33

 Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 4; on climate-culture links in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 

see also: James Rodger Fleming and Vladimir Jankovic, eds., Klima, vol. 26, Osiris (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 2011). 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 59 
 

 

 

The ensuing diversity of evidence, however, still posed great challenges, which 

led to the “grave confusion” that Brückner perceived in climate change debates of the late 

nineteenth century.
34

 In Climate Oscillations, Brückner took inventory of the many 

different opinions about climate variations, listing the sometimes-ambiguous source 

material from historical accounts about the disappearance of oases to viticultural 

geography, and calling into question the validity of some of the proposed evidence.35 The 

critique pointed to more general questions: how could climatologists compare the 

commonly cited descriptions of North African environments by Herodotus to colonial 

data series of precipitation and barometric pressure from the nineteenth century? How 

could they square the often-contradictory accounts about climatic conditions written by 

imperial explorers? And how could they sort “good” from “bad” data, when the 

evaluation required intimate knowledge in areas as far apart as modern meteorological 

technology and the exegesis of classical Greek geographical treatises? 

 These questions could not be brushed aside easily. After all, the contentious 

debate over climatic changes and variations was in full swing in the late nineteenth 

century. Based on descriptions by past and present explorers of the Mediterranean region 

and North Africa, the German geographer Theobald Fischer and some of his colleagues 

argued for an ongoing expansion of desert conditions, which could not be explained 

solely through human action. The immediate reactions to these claims were divided into 

three distinct groups: there were the contributions that agreed and mused about various 

geological or cosmic causes for large climatic changes; those that agreed with the finding 

of large climatic changes, but found human actions, such as deforestation or the 

destruction of irrigation works, sufficient to explain the phenomena; and finally those that 

argued against any major climatic change having taken or taking place in either North 

Africa, the Mediterranean, or anywhere else around the globe.
36

  

The contributors to the debate frequently attacked their opponents by claiming 

reliance on untrustworthy, incompatible, or unstandardized evidence, but often had to 

rely on the very same data for information on past climates. Franz von Czerny, for 

instance, lamented in 1887 that the “young science of meteorology” could not yet provide 

sufficient – and sufficiently reliable – data from past centuries for conclusive 

climatological answers; but he still used the existence of ruins in desert regions as 

evidence to bolster claims that the climate had, in fact, changed during historical times.
37

 

Authors on different sides of the debate would sometimes even use the same or similar 

evidence to back up widely divergent or even contradictory arguments, further 

demonstrating the problems of historical proxy data. The travelogues of the German 

Sahara explorer Heinrich Barth, for example, were used to argue both for and against an 

ongoing desiccation in the region.
38

 And in an attempted overview of the climate change 

                                                   
34

 Brückner, In wie weit ist das heutige Klima konstant?, 115. 
35

 Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, 10–49. 
36

 See footnote #19. 
37

 Czerny, Die Veränderlichkeit des Klimas und ihre Ursachen, 1–4. 
38

 See: Heinrich Barth, Wanderungen durch das punische und kyrenäische Küstenland oder Mâg’reb, 

Afrikîa und Barka, 2 vols. (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1849); Heinrich Barth, Reisen und Entdeckungen in 

Nord- und Central-Afrika in den Jahren 1849 bis 1855, 5 vols. (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1857); for the use of 

Barth’s writings in support of climatic changes in North Africa, see, for instance: Fischer, Studien über das 

Klima der Mittelmeerländer, 44; Fischer, “Klima-Änderung im südlichen Mittelmeergebiet und in der 

nördlichen Sahara,” 3–4; for the use of Barth’s writings against theories of progressive climatic changes in 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 60 
 

 

 

debate, Brückner himself highlighted the fact that it “seems almost like a psychological 

puzzle, that for one and the same country serious scientists have at every step insisted on 

climate changes which are mutually exclusive.”
39

 Despite claims by Czerny and others 

that there was not enough material to arrive at a consensus over potential climatic 

instability, the diversity of the evidence used in the debate shows that practitioners were 

actually confronted with a large – and always growing – wealth of sometimes-ambiguous 

data.  

This issue of heterogeneous data made practitioners vulnerable to attacks 

questioning the commensurability and trustworthiness of the evidence used. To deal with 

the difficulties, Hann sometimes focused on delimited, particular localities to extrapolate 

universal climatic rules. One instance of this approach was his generalization of climatic 

conditions in mountainous regions constructed on the basis of information of one 

particular stretch of the Alps.
40

 Similarly, Brückner extrapolated his universal climate 

cycles from his findings in Europe, for which he had the most complete datasets (Fig. 1). 

While the available historic data on grape harvests and the incidence of cold winters only 

gave evidence about European conditions, he argued, “we should not disguise the fact 

that indirectly [the proof] is of universal significance around the globe.”
41

 This is not to 

say that Brückner did not try hard enough to get information from other parts of the world. 

In fact, he collected as much evidence as he could, but then ended up having to bend 

some of the data to fit his inductive model of universal 35-year climatic cycles.
42

  

The biggest problem, however, persisted despite the effort of climatologists to 

bring order into their varied datasets: while the existing evidence could be marshaled to 

point to the presence of one or another kind of climatic change or oscillation, the 

potential causes for these processes were not inherent in the data. And without a 

convincing explanatory mechanism, the debate over climate change was set to continue 

without a generally accepted resolution. Despite their interpretative differences, all sides 

of the debate were unified by an omnipresent uncertainty and evasiveness when it came 

to the discussion of the potential mechanism behind climatic changes. Practitioners 

marshaled competing hypotheses about solar influences, changes in land elevation, 

changes in oceanic circulation, shifts in the shape of the earth’s orbit, changes in the 

earth’s axis alignment, the impact of volcanic activity, and human action. None of these 

explanations could gather unified support, as the causal models remained not only based 

on different and sometimes contradictory data sets, but also unverifiable.
43

 Brückner, for 

                                                                                                                                                        

the region, see, for instance: Hermann Leiter, Die Frage der Klimaänderung während geschichtlicher Zeit 

in Nordafrika, Abhandlungen der k. k. Geographischen Gesellschaft in Wien 8 (Vienna: R. Lechner, 1909). 
39

 Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, 34–35; the English translation is taken from: Eduard Brückner, 

“Climate Change Since 1700,” in Eduard Brückner: The Sources and Consequences of Climate Change 

and Climate Variability in Historical Times, ed. by Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr (Dordrecht: Kluwer 

Academic Publishers, 2000), 117–118. 
40

 Julius von Hann, Die Temperaturverhältnisse der österreichischen Alpenländer (Vienna: Kaiserliche 

Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1884); this case is described in: Coen, “Climate and Circulation in Imperial 

Austria,” 856–857. 
41

 Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, 272 [my translation]. 
42

 One case in point was Brückner’s treatment of incongruities of European rainfall data from the 

eighteenth century; see: Ibid., 266–267; for the English translation of this part, see: Brückner, “Climate 

Change Since 1700,” 160–161. 
43

 For a short overview of the competing theories, see: Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming 

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1–18; see also: Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 61 
 

 

 

all of his detailed work in gathering meteorological and climatological evidence and in 

performing data analyses, sounded vague in discussing the mechanisms behind his 

proposed thirty-five year cycles. In the short section on the subject in his book, he 

elusively expressed his “conjecture that processes on the sun may possibly be the cause 

of the climatic oscillations.”
44

  

In his attempts to define climatology, Julius Hann had considered the possibility 

of describing it as a descriptive sub-field of meteorology, but the short shrift given to 

causal mechanisms was not – or at least not only – because all climatologists freely chose 

to delimit their work in this way.
45

 Rather, climatology was forced to be a descriptive 

discipline, because explanatory hypotheses could not be tested or substantiated. On the 

one hand, cosmic theories of climatic changes often lacked sufficient data. On the other, 

the investigation of potential telluric causes for climatic changes was often hampered by 

the mass of heterogeneous and controversial data from different environments, which 

made any attempt at constructing syntheses or viable models difficult.
46

 This conundrum 

led some climatologists to review their own data practices. One year before the 

publication of Brückner’s main study, Joseph Partsch had already criticized the 

“uncertainties of method” among climatologists in dealing with historical information. 

While Partsch – trained as a geographer, philologist, and historian – conceded that the 

historical methods were indispensable for climate scientists, he saw a lack of standardized 

guidelines for the interpretation of historical evidence and the undue focus on reports on 

weather extremes as some of the main issues.
47

 A few years later, Wladimir Köppen 

mirrored Partsch’s critique by casting doubt on the accuracy and comparability of 

historical accounts of climates: with an illustrative example of classical descriptions of 

Northern Europe, Köppen highlighted the fact that cultural evaluations often influenced 

the characterization of climatic conditions.
48

 

Brückner himself joined the critics in likening his overview of the literature on 

climatic changes to “[walking] through a veritable labyrinth without the benefit of 

Ariadne’s clew.”
49

 After the turn of the century, the criticism of climatological methods 

                                                                                                                                                        

Change, 65 ff; Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch, Klima, Wetter, Mensch (Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2010), 

77–79; Robert P. Beckinsale, Richard J. Chorley, and J. Dunn, eds., The History of the Study of Landforms, 

or, the Development of Geomorphology, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 1991), 48–56; André Berger, “A Brief 

History of the Astronomical Theories of Paleoclimates,” in Climate Change, ed. by André Berger, Fedor 

Mesinger, and Djordje Sijacki (Vienna: Springer, 2012), 107–129. 
44

 Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, 240 [my translation]. 
45

 Hann, Handbuch der Klimatologie, 2–3. 
46

 I am using “models” here in the sense of collections of observations and rules and not in the more 

narrowly defined sense of Paul Edwards as “mathematical simulations, based on physical principles, of […] 

long-term atmospheric conditions.” Paul N. Edwards, “Representing the Global Atmosphere: Computer 

Models, Data, and Knowledge About Climate Change,” in Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge 

and Environmental Governance, ed. by Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards (Cambridge: MIT Press, 

2001), 31–65; for an example of early modeling, see for instance: Vladimir Janković, “Climates as 

Commodities: Jean Pierre Purry and the Modelling of the Best Climate on Earth,” Studies in History and 

Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 41, no. 3 (September 

2010): 201–207. 
47

 Partsch, “Über den Nachweis einer Klimaänderung der Mittelmeerländer.” 
48

 Wladimir Köppen, “Die gegenwärtige Lage und die neueren Fortschritte der Klimatologie,” 

Geographische Zeitschrift 1 (1895): 625. 
49

 Brückner, Klimaschwankungen seit 1700, 34; the English translation is taken from: Brückner, “Climate 

Change Since 1700,” 115. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 62 
 

 

 

and results became even more outspoken. In 1901, the Swedish meteorologist Nils 

Ekholm reflected on the impossibility to draw any definite conclusions about climatic 

changes in the historical past:  
 

It remains to consider the variations of the climate during the historical period. Here we 

certainly find a richer material of observations than before, but at the same time such a 

want of order and regularity that it seems at present nearly impossible to obtain a survey 

of and establish a connection between the shifting phenomena. Here we cannot see the 

wood for trees. First, during the last hundred or hundred and fifty years, since there began 

to be regular meteorological observations, the survey becomes easier; but then, on the 

other hand, the time is too short, so that from this reason no reliable conclusions can be 

drawn. Moreover, the material is so rich that the energy of a single man is insufficient to 

work it out.
50

  

 

A few pages later Ekholm referred to the meteorological data series from various 

European cities, concluding that “[w]hether the climatic variations during the last 100 or 

150 years here considered are periodic, progressive, or accidental cannot yet be 

decided.”
51

 This was, among other things, an attack on Brückner’s conclusions. 

While Ekholm’s summary may say more about his own cautious stance in the 

climate change debate than represent an unbiased overview, his insistence on data issues 

is telling. It was not so much a lack of data, but rather the overly “rich material” in 

climatology that Ekholm deplored. The diverse data drawn from different times, sources, 

and places represented an astounding archive of information; but for climatologists who 

aspired to establish their still young field in the academic landscape, this eclectic and 

heterogeneous archive of non-standardized data was also difficult to deal with. It offered 

a wealth of data, but little hope for clear-cut answers and causal explanations.  

 

Towards a Dynamic Climatology? 

 

The debates among practitioners about the collection, analysis, and interpretation of 

diverse data sets heralded a period of disciplinary uncertainty, which opened up a number 

of potential avenues for the study of climatic phenomena in the early twentieth century. 

One of these avenues led towards a convergence – or, rather, an anticipated convergence 

– with new approaches in physical meteorology and, thus, to a shift of focus away from 

Brückner’s eclectic archive of historical weather information and towards a bias for 

physics, causal models, and the upper realms of the atmosphere.  

This is neither to say that the field of climatology underwent a sudden 

transformation nor that approaches and practices in meteorology were uncontroversial 

and uniform. In any case, the borders between the two fields remained amorphous, or at 

least blurred, with many practitioners working on both issues of weather and climate. 

Nineteenth-century meteorology had struggled with some of the same data, issues, and 

approaches – and thus, some of the same difficulties – as climatological studies. 
                                                   
50

 Nils Ekholm, “On the Variations of the Climate of the Geological and Historical Past and Their Causes,” 

Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 27, no. 117 (1901): 46; a digital version of this 

article can be accessed at: 

http://nsdl.library.cornell.edu/websites/wiki/index.php/PALE_ClassicArticles/GlobalWarming.html (item 

#5). 
51

 Ibid., 59. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 63 
 

 

 

Moreover, the status of climatology continued to be ambiguous, perceived alternatively 

as an independent field of inquiry necessary for the construction of meteorological 

theories, or as an auxiliary science to meteorology.52 And nineteenth-century meteorology, 

just like climatology, grappled with the role and methodological function of the new 

science of statistics and with its own acceptance as an exact science within the academic 

community.
53

 Cleveland Abbe summarized his view of the shortcomings of his discipline 

in a sweeping critique in 1895: “Hitherto, the professional meteorologist has too 

frequently been only an observer, a statistician, an empiricist - rather than a mechanician, 

mathematician and physicist.”
54

  

By that time, however, the criticism’s sweeping claim was not applicable to the 

whole field of meteorology anymore: distancing themselves from purely empirical and 

inductive approaches, some nineteenth-century physical meteorologists had attempted to 

move towards Abbe’s ideals and had established a “theoretical tradition” in 

meteorology.55 As Katherine Anderson has shown, these practitioners already dealt with 

“accounts of the dynamics of the atmosphere,” while the bulk of climatological work 

continued to be beholden to the telluric sciences and the Hippocratic focus on place and 

nature.
56

 The ongoing disciplinary discussions around climate change debates around the 

turn of the century, however, challenged this distinction. Some climatologists started to 

envision their field turning away from the eclectic archives of terrestrial, historical 

evidence and towards the atmosphere in search for causal mechanisms behind climatic 

phenomena. They looked to developments in dynamic meteorology as an opportunity to 

gain more insight into global climatic dynamics and to refashion their own field of study 

along the lines of new developments in the study of weather.  

The growing emphasis on atmospheric dynamics was becoming an increasingly 

viable avenue of research with the continuing international efforts for a coordinated 

collection and standardization of quantifiable data from meteorological stations and the 

development of atmospheric circulation models:
57

 William Ferrel had worked on general 

circulation as early as the 1850s.
58

  And Vilhelm Bjerknes – prodded by none other than 

Ekholm to start working in the field of geophysics – began to develop his influential 

model of a “general circulation theorem” in the 1890s, before publishing his seminal 

article on “The Problem of Weather Prediction, Regarded from the Vantage Point of 
                                                   
52

 Hann himself referred to this ambiguity by describing a wider and a narrower way of conceptualizing 

meteorology; see: Hann, Handbook of Climatology, 2. 
53

 See: Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 131–170; Frederik Nebeker, Calculating the Weather: 

Meteorology in the 20th Century, International Geophysics Series 60 (San Diego: Academic Press, 1995), 

21–24. 
54

 Cited in: Nebeker, Calculating the Weather, 28. 
55

 The term is borrowed from: Ibid., 27–35. 
56

 Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 8; on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas of weather and 

climate, which continued to be important in the nineteenth century, see: Vladimir Janković, Reading the 

Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650-1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 

2000); Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: The University of 

Chicago Press, 2007). 
57

 As Paul Edwards points out, the collection and standardization of meteorological data from around the 

world did not always go smoothly; see: Paul N. Edwards, “Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism,” 

Osiris 21, 2nd Series (January 1, 2006): 229–250; the International Meteorological Organization (later 

World Meteorological Organization or WMO), founded in 1873 nevertheless held the promise for a bright 

future of standardized and global data sets. 
58

 See: William Ferrel, An Essay on the Winds and the Currents of the Ocean (Cameron & Fall, 1856). 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 64 
 

 

 

Mechanics and Physics” in 1904.
59

 In just seven pages, Bjerknes laid out an integrated 

approach in dynamic meteorology, combining theoretical and practical dimensions.
60

 

Remarkably, Bjerknes managed to do that without a single equation, which may have 

contributed to the widespread reception of the article. And while Bjerknes conceived of 

his work explicitly as a response to the “prognosis problem of meteorology” – or what 

James Fleming describes as the “Gordian Knot” of meteorology in this volume – the 

disciplinary developments caught the eye of scientists working on climatic issues as 

well.
61

  

In an 1895 review article about the state of his field, Köppen had already 

described the “general circulation of the atmosphere” as one of the “central issues of 

climatology.”
62

 He cited a long and eclectic tradition of work on atmospheric circulation 

from William Ferrel, the Norwegians Henrik Mohn and Cato Maximilian Guldberg, to 

the German physicist and industrialist Werner Siemens.
63

 For Köppen, this emphasis on 

atmospheric processes also meant that climatology was moving closer towards 

meteorology, with the “geographical element taking a backseat.”
64

 And it was from these 

meteorological investigations into atmospheric dynamics that Köppen expected “light,” 

or new impulses and insights, for climatology.
65

 

The disciplinary developments in climatology that would eventually bring the 

discipline over to the field of atmospheric physics were slow and would only come to full 

fruition in the second half of the twentieth century, where many accounts of modern 

climate science begin.
66 

Bjerknes himself still lacked both computational capacity and 

sufficient data on atmospheric conditions to make full use of his mathematical models of 
                                                   
59

 Vilhelm Bjerknes, “Über einen hydrodynamischen Fundamentalsatz und seine Anwendung besonders auf 

die Mechanik der Atmosphäre und des Weltmeeres,” Kungl. Svenska Vetenskaps-Akedemiens Handlingar 

31 (1898): 1–35; Vilhelm Bjerknes, “Das dynamische Princip der Cirkulationsbewegungen in der 

Atmosphäre,” Meteorologische Zeitschrift 17 (1900): 97–106; Vilhelm Bjerknes, “Das Problem der 

Wettervorhersage, betrachtet vom Standpunkte der Mechanik und der Physik,” Meteorologische Zeitschrift 

21 (1904): 1–7; Vilhelm Bjerknes et al., Dynamic Meteorology and Hydrography, 2 vols. (Washington, 

DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1910); Vilhelm Bjerknes, “The Structure of the Atmosphere 

When Rain is Falling,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 46, no. 194 (1920): 119–

140; on Bjerknes’ influence on twentieth-century meteorology, see: Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating 

the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Ithaca: Cornell University 

Press, 1989); Alan J. Thorpe, Hans Volkert, and Michal J. Ziemianski, “The Bjerknes’ Circulation 

Theorem: A Historical Perspective,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 84, no. 4 (2003): 

471–480; Sigbjørn Grønås, “Vilhelm Bjerknes’ Vision for Scientific Weather Prediction,” in The Nordic 

Seas: An Integrated Perspective. Oceanography, Climatology, Biogeochemistry, and Modeling, ed. by 

Helge Drange et al. (Washington, DC: American Geophysical Union, 2005), 357–366; Gabriele 

Gramelsberger, “Conceiving Meteorology as the Exact Science of the Atmosphere: Vilhelm Bjerknes’s 

Paper of 1904 as a Milestone,” Meteorologische Zeitschrift 18, no. 6 (2009): 669–673. 
60

 Cf.: Gramelsberger, “Conceiving Meteorology,” 672; see also: Nebeker, Calculating the Weather, 47–57. 
61

 Bjerknes, “Das Problem der Wettervorhersage,” 1; for Fleming’s description of Bjerknes’ contribution to 

unravelling the Gordian Knot of meteorology, see his contribution in this volume. 
62

 Köppen, “Die gegenwärtige Lage und die neueren Fortschritte der Klimatologie,” 626. 
63

 On Mohn’s approach to climatology, see Gunnar Ellingsen’s article in this volume. 
64

 Köppen, “Die gegenwärtige Lage und die neueren Fortschritte der Klimatologie,” 627. 
65

 Ibid. 
66

 See, for instance: Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming; in his recollections, the climatologist Joseph 

Smagorinsky also dated the shift of climatology from “a branch of descriptive geography to one of 

quantitative physical science” to the late 1950s; see: J. Smagorinsky, “The Beginnings of Numerical 

Weather Prediction and General Circulation Modeling: Early Recollections,” Advances in Geophysics 25 

(1983): 36. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 65 
 

 

 

atmospheric dynamics.
67

 He avowed in 1904 that “a strict analytical integration” of the 

equations was not possible and proposed the use of graphical methods to solve his own 

multivariable equations.
68

 After his return from Germany to Norway in 1917, Bjerknes 

told his colleague Arrhenius that the dynamic approach in meteorology was still far from 

becoming an applied tool or – in his own words – “[t]here is still a long way to go to 

anything practical.”
69

 Arrhenius himself had voiced similar concerns about dynamic 

meteorology in 1903 and advised the tackling of simple problems instead of systematic 

issues.
70

 Bjerknes’ ideas ran up against issues of feasibility and they neither managed to 

transform the field of meteorology nor unify its practitioners and their approaches 

overnight.  

Despite the evident obstacles, Bjerknes was generally optimistic about the future 

of his approach.
71

 And in fact, the methods of graphical integration that he proposed and 

practiced would serve as the cornerstone of the Bergen School, which would become 

highly influential in weather forecasting in the interwar years.
72

 Bjerknes’ 1904 vision of 

a “dynamic” meteorology as an atmospheric physical science based on a combination of 

thermo- and fluid dynamics was a new avenue in research that slowly but steadily gained 

appeal, even beyond the field of applied meteorology.
73

 Despite the practical limitations 

of the dynamical approach at the time, many of Bjerknes’ contemporaries, including a 

number of climatologists, saw a potential for the future. A focus on atmospheric 

dynamics promised physical models of climatic phenomena that could – at least 

potentially – hold answers to some of the central questions of climatic variations and 

changes.  

Bjerknes’ methods were thus far removed from Brückner’s historical study of 

climate cycles, which paid little attention to atmospheric phenomena or causal 

mechanisms. The Bergen group’s approaches would, in fact, contribute to a widening of 

the gap between telluric and atmospheric approaches in the study of climate: in their 

1910/11 textbook, Bjerknes and his co-authors set their own “dynamic method” apart 

from the “climatological method,“ which they regarded as unable to deal with 

the ”irregular phenomena" of the atmosphere because of their focus on means and 

averages.
74

 Some meteorologists now turned explicitly against climatology – meaning 

climatology of the Brücknerian kind – as an outdated method. The term “climatology” 

itself appeared more and more as a term of abuse among physically and atmospherically-

minded meteorologists. In their eyes, climatology became the old-fashioned, stubborn, 

                                                   
67

 Only in the 1960s did computers become powerful enough to process models based on Bjerknes’ 

equations; see: Paul N. Edwards, “A Brief History of Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling,” in 

General Circulation Model Development, ed. by David A. Randall (San Diego: Academic Press, 2000), 70. 
68

 See: Joseph J. Tribbia and Richard A. Anthes, “Scientific Basis of Modern Weather Prediction,” Science 

237 (1987): 493–499. 
69

 Bjerknes, “Das Problem der Wettervorhersage,” 3; the quote from Bjerknes’ letter to Arrhenius is taken 

from: Ralph Jewell, “Tor Bergeron’s First Year in the Bergen School: Towards an Historical Appreciation,” 

Pure and Applied Geophysics 119, no. 3 (May 1, 1980): 478. 
70

 Arrhenius, Lehrbuch der kosmischen Physik, 736. 
71

 See: Grønås, “Vilhelm Bjerknes’ Vision for Scientific Weather Prediction,” 360. 
72

 See: Friedman, Appropriating the Weather. 
73

 On the importance of thermodynamics in the development of meteorological theories in the second half 

of the nineteenth century, see: Gisela Kutzbach, The Thermal Theory of Cyclones: A History of 

Meteorological Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1979). 
74

 Bjerknes et al., Dynamic Meteorology and Hydrography, v. 2, 3–4. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 66 
 

 

 

and mildly embarrassing old relative of a young and dynamic meteorology.
75

 Alfred 

Wegener, of continental-drift fame, advised meteorologists-in-training who did not want 

to “limit themselves to [either] practical weather forecasting or climatology […] to 

scrupulously study theoretical physics. The article, tellingly published in a volume on the 

“results of the exact natural sciences,” celebrated Bjerknes as the most important 

innovator in meteorology. Mathematical analysis,” Wegener wrote, “has replaced 

statistics as the main tool of the meteorologist.”
76

  

Wegener himself also played a part in making the shift towards the atmosphere 

possible, by collecting atmospheric readings from kite-mounted instruments he used 

during his Greenland expeditions. With his efforts, he took part in the consolidation and 

expansion of atmospheric data gathering around the globe led by Teisserenc de Bort and 

Richard Assmann.
77

 The two pioneers of aerological research both responded to a call for 

more atmospheric information and stimulated continued atmospheric research. With more 

and more data provided by balloons, airships, kites, and airplanes over the first half of the 

twentieth century, the upper strata of the atmosphere became an increasingly viable place 

for both meteorological and climatological investigation.
78

  

In the 1920s, promoters of a physical turn in climatology now criticized what they 

saw as the overly descriptive methods and the focus on averages and means by Hann, and 

they explicitly cited Bjerknes and the “Norwegian school” as examples to follow.
79

 And 

even practitioners who explicitly distanced themselves from parts of Bjerknes’ work and 

approach, now began to think about new dynamic models of climatology. In 1921 Albert 

Defant, a student of the Austrian dynamic meteorologist Felix Exner, provided the 

equation-heavy “outline of a theory of climatic variations” based on disturbances in 

                                                   
75

 Cf.: Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “Seeing the Oceans in the Shadow of Bergen Values,” Isis 105, no. 2 (June 

1, 2014): 354–355; as Magnus Vollset shows in his contribution to this volume, the low prestige of 

climatology among meteorologists persisted unabated into the 1940s and 1950s. 
76

 Alfred Wegener, “Ergebnisse der dynamischen Meteorologie,” in Ergebnisse der exakten 

Naturwissenschaften (Springer, 1926), 96 [my emphasis]; see also: Patrick Hughes, “The Meteorologist 

Who Started a Revolution,” Weatherwise 47, no. 2 (1994): 29–35. 
77

 See: Friedman, Appropriating the Weather, 48–51, 67–69; Stefan Brönnimann and Alexander Stickler, 

“Aerological observations in the Tropics in the Early Twentieth Century,” Meteorologische Zeitschrift 22, 

no. 3 (July 1, 2013): 349–358. 
78

 See: Friedman, Appropriating the Weather, 37–38, 48–51; Kutzbach, The Thermal Theory of Cyclones, 

134–139; C. Lüdecke, “From the Bottom to the Stratosphere Arctic Climate Features as Seen from the First 

International Polar Year (1882–1883) Until the End of World War II,” in Climate Variability and Extremes 

during the Past 100 Years, ed. by Stefan Brönnimann et al., Advances in Global Change Research 33 

(Springer Netherlands, 2008), 29–45. 
79

 A. Stevens, “The New Outlook in Meteorology and Its Geographical Bearings,” The Scottish 

Geographical Magazine 43, no. 4 (1927): 218–236; for a similar criticism of Hann’s conception of climate 

and a call for new emphasis on atmospheric circulation in climate science, see: Hans Schrepfer, “Die 

Polarfronttheorie in ihrer Bedeutung für die Klimate der Festländer,” Geographische Zeitschrift 30, no. 3 

(January 1, 1924): 161–177; the portrayal of Hann as part of the “old school” of climatology overlooked the 

fact that Hann had actively supported Bjerknes’ work and helped to make it known outside of Scandinavia; 

see: Friedman, Appropriating the Weather, 38–39; Gramelsberger, “Conceiving Meteorology,” 671; Hann 

had also worked on thermodynamic models to explain meteorological phenomena himself, especially in his 

work on Föhn winds; see: Julius Hann, “Zur Frage über den Ursprung des Föhn,” Zeitschrift der 

österreichischen Gesellschaft für Meteorologie 1 (1866): 257–263; Julius Hann, “Der Föhn in den 

österreichischen Alpen,” Zeitschrift der österreichischen Gesellschaft für Meteorologie 2 (1867): 433–445; 

Julius Hann, “Einige Bemerkungen zur Entwickelungs-Geschichte der Ansichten über den Ursprung des 

Föhn,” Meteorologische Zeitschrift 20 (1885): 393–399. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 67 
 

 

 

atmospheric circulation systems.
80

 And meteorologists of the Bergen School – among 

them Vilhelm Bjerknes’ son Jacob – continued to supply new theoretical detail and 

features to the dynamic model of the atmosphere.
81

 In 1930, these still disparate 

developments culminated in the mission statement of a new kind of “dynamic 

climatology” by Tor Bergeron, who had been a collaborator of Bjerknes in Bergen. In the 

article, Bergeron called for a focus on analyses of air mass and front phenomena to bring 

climatology closer in line with meteorological approaches and to describe the “entirety of 

phenomena” (Gesamterscheinungen). Clearly distinct from Brückner’s ambitions to 

create a vast searchable archive of past climatic conditions around the globe, Bergeron 

was referring to a holistic image of the “frequencies and intensities” of dynamic 

atmospheric systems.
82

 

This, however, was not the decisive blow that Bergeron may have hoped for. 

Climatology retained its colorful range of methodologies. Rather than in disciplinary 

revolution, the debates over data and approaches of the late nineteenth century and the 

proposals of an alignment with atmospheric dynamics in meteorology ensued in tentative 

reform and reevaluation among climatologists. “Dynamic climatology” existed, above all, 

in calls for a new approach to the science, as in Defant’s and Bergeron’s respective 

articles. In the same year as Bergeron’s publication and in a short popular volume 

describing the state of the field of climatology, Karl Knoch referred to the “harsh 

criticism” that traditional climatological methods had come under, but added resignedly 

that improvement attempts had not yet managed to “replace the old with something better 

that could deliver similarly significant results.”
83

 Knoch’s mention of the “significant 

results” that new climatological methods had failed to produce referred, most likely, to 

the still purely notional nature of new dynamic approaches in the field.  

It is, moreover, important to remember that the early decades of the twentieth 

century were also the time of the desiccationist theory of the geographer Prince 

Kropotkin and of Ellsworth Huntington’s climatic-cultural analyses of world history.
84

 
                                                   
80

 A. Defant, “Die Zirkulation der Atmosphäre in den gemässigten Breiten der Erde: Grundzüge einer 

Theorie der Klimaschwankungen,” Geografiska Annaler 3 (January 1, 1921): 209–266 ; for Exner’s main 

meteorological work, see: Felix M. Exner, Dynamische Meteorologie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1917); for more 

information on Exner’s conceptual and methodological criticism of Bjerknes’ work, see: Deborah R. Coen, 

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 2008), 288–292. 
81

 See: John E. Kutzbach, “Steps in the Evolution of Climatology: From Descriptive to Analytic,” in 

Historical Essays on Meteorology, 1919-1995, ed. by James Rodger Fleming (Boston: American 

Meteorological Society, 1996), 353–377. 
82

 Tor Bergeron, “Richtlinien einer dynamischen Klimatologie,” Meteorologische Zeitschrift 47, no. 7 

(1930): 246–262; on Bergeron’s training in the Bergen School, see: Jewell, “Tor Bergeron’s First Year in 

the Bergen School”; on Bergeron’s contribution to developing the Bergen cyclone model, see: Friedman, 

Appropriating the Weather, 169 ff.; Bergeron’s claim to novelty with his model of a “dynamic climatology” 

did not go undisputed; see, for instance: S. Chromow, “‘Dynamische Klimatologie’ und Dove,” Zeitschrift 

für angewandte Meteorologie 48, no. 10 (1930): 312–314. 
83

 Knoch, Klima und Klimaschwankungen, 11. 
84

 For Kropotkin’s article and the ensuing discussion, see: Prince Kropotkin, “The Desiccation of Eur-Asia,” 

The Geographical Journal 23, no. 6 (June 1904): 722–734; Prince Kropotkin, John Walter Gregory, and 

Edmond Cotter, “Correspondence: On the Desiccation of Eurasia and Some General Aspects of 

Desiccation,” The Geographical Journal 43, no. 4 (1914): 451–459; for a selection of Huntington’s work 

on climatic variations and changes, see: Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia: A Journey in Central 

Asia Illustrating the Geographical Basis of History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907); Ellsworth 

Huntington, Palestine and its Transformation (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911); Ellsworth 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 68 
 

 

 

Huntington, now maybe most infamous for his eugenicist convictions, cited Brückner as 

inspiration for his work on climatic cycles and continued the geographical, or telluric, 

tradition of the field.
85

 Thus, while some climatologists attempted to align their methods 

with theoretical meteorology, others moved even more definitively to a telluric and 

descriptive interpretation of their field of study, leading the geographer Stephen Jones to 

refer to two kinds of climatology in 1937, with “the climatology of geographers […] a 

long way from the climatology of meteorologists.”
86

 In Germany, in particular, the 

former branch of climatology became more closely linked to racial and völkish ideas. To 

name just two examples: Willy Hellpach – despite his deep liberal political convictions – 

gradually developed his theory of the psychological influences of climate to arrive at a 

description of climatic zones as “constitutive of Völkertum [race/nation]”
87

; and Albrecht 

Penck – Brückner’s teacher and collaborator – developed ideas of a climatically-defined 

“Kulturboden” or “cultural soil,” which would later become a central part of imperial 

Nazi ideology.
88

  

 

Conclusion 

 

                                                                                                                                                        

Huntington, “Changes of Climate and History,” The American Historical Review 18, no. 2 (January 1, 

1913): 213–232; Ellsworth Huntington and Stephen Sargent Visher, Climatic Changes: Their Nature and 

Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922); Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate, 3rd ed. 

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924); Huntington was a controversial figure even in his lifetime. 

Especially among German-speaking geographers and climatologists, he did not enjoy a particularly high 

reputation for his often sensationalist work; for a scathing critique of Huntington’s work, see for instance: 

Joseph Partsch, Palmyra, eine historisch-klimatische Studie (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1922); Eduard 

Brückner was another critic. He wrote a letter casting doubt on Huntington’s academic merits, when the 

latter applied (ultimately with success) for a position at Yale University; see: Fleming, Historical 

Perspectives on Climate Change, 98. 
85

 Huntington, Civilization and Climate, 25. 
86

 Cited in: William A. Koelsch, “From Geo- to Physical Science: Meteorology and the American 

University, 1919–1945,” in Historical Essays on Meteorology, 1919-1995, ed. by James Rodger Fleming 

(Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1996), 519; for an overview of developments and disciplinary 

conflicts in geography in the early twentieth century, see: Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 260–

303. 
87

 Willy Hellpach, Geopsyche: Die Menschenseele unterm Einfluß von Wetter und Klima, Boden und 

Landschaft, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1939), 160; for the first edition of the book, still without 

the emphasis on race, see: Willy Hellpach, Die geopsychischen Erscheinungen: Wetter und Klima und 

Landschaft in ihrem Einfluss auf das Seelenleben (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1911). 
88

 For Penck’s influential article on “cultural soil,” see: Albrecht Penck, “Deutscher Volks- und 

Kulturboden,” in Volk unter Völkern: Bücher des Deutschtums, ed. by K. C. Loesch (Breslau: Hirt, 1925), 

62–72; on the political involvement and influence of Penck’s ideas, see: Hans-Dietrich Schultz, “‘Ein 

wachsendes Volk braucht Raum’: Albrecht Penck als politischer Geograph,” in 1810-2010: 200 Jahre 

Geographie in Berlin: an der Universität zu Berlin (ab 1810), Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (ab 

1828), Universität Berlin (ab 1946), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (ab 1949), ed. by Bernhard Nitz, 

Hans-Dietrich Schultz, and Marlies Schulz (Berlin: Geographisches Institut der Humboldt Universität zu 

Berlin, 2010), 91–135; Jürgen Zimmerer, “Im Dienste des Imperiums: Die Geographen der Berliner 

Universität zwischen Kolonialwissenschaften und Ostforschung,” in Universitäten und Kolonialismus, ed. 

by Andreas Eckert, Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte 7 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004), 95; Mechtild Rössler, 

“Wissenschaft und Lebensraum”: Geographische Ostforschung im Nationalsozialismus - ein Beitrag zur 

Disziplingeschichte der Geographie, vol. 8, Hamburger Beiträge zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlin: D. 

Reimer, 1990), 225. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 69 
 

 

 

In the first third of the twentieth century, climatology remained a field unsure of its own 

identity. Its practitioners were unable to overcome the data problems of research into 

climatic variability from the late nineteenth century, and just as unable to come up with 

new viable methods accepted by a majority of their peers. But this moment of 

disciplinary reevaluation and uncertainty also made dynamic atmospheric approaches 

attractive to those who had become critical of climatological data practices and who were 

looking for a more demarcated and deductive approach for the future of their field. 

Brückner’s profoundly historical approach, bridging the deepening fault lines between the 

natural sciences and the humanities, still served as a model for the work of some 

climatologists, but had begun to be challenged by calls for what would become known as 

“dynamic climatology” – the study of climatic phenomena based on models of 

atmospheric dynamics.  

In her study on the history of population ecology, Sharon Kingsland has argued 

that "the very act of imposing mathematics (or any model) on nature often involved a 

rejection of history in favor of a harmonious, unifying concept.”
89

 Climate science – or 

rather, one part of climate science – exhibited a similar development in the early 

twentieth century. The social dimension, which had been inherent both in Brückner’s 

historical data and in his discussions of climatic variation, began to play a lesser role in 

the work of those climate scientists who started to move away from the messy concerns 

of the earth and geography and into the atmosphere and approaches modeled on dynamic 

meteorology. The new numerical and mathematical approaches attempted to turn 

climatology into a distinctly natural science, reducing the archival and historical aspect of 

the discipline. 

The full practical application of a dynamic, numerical, and atmospheric climate 

science was still only a distant possibility at the time. The first calls for disciplinary 

reform, however, began to take shape well before the advent of both the electronic 

computer and fully developed atmospheric circulation models – two technologies at the 

center of modern dynamic climate science today.
90

 In fact, the new ideas about 

climatological approaches in the first decades of the twentieth century were not premised 

on the availability of new technologies of data analysis.
91

 Instead, they were closely 

connected to both the availability – and, more often than not, the promise of the imminent 

availability – of numerical and standardized data from the upper realms of the atmosphere, 

and on the privileging of these over other kinds of data as a result of the attempts to 

                                                   
89

 Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology, 2nd ed. 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8. 
90

 I am borrowing the chronological sequence of “climatology” and “climate science” from: Matthias 

Heymann, “The Evolution of Climate Ideas and Knowledge,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate 

Change 1, no. 4 (2010): 581–597. 
91

 I am largely following Jon Agar’s claim here that computers did not cause a “rupture” or “phase change” 

in science, but rather provided new capacities for already existing approaches to solving particular 

problems; see: Jon Agar, “What Difference Did Computers Make?,” Social Studies of Science 36, no. 6 

(December 1, 2006): 869–907; see also: Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences 

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 109 ff; for a case in point, see: David Sepkoski, “Towards ‘A Natural 

History of Data’: Evolving Practices and Epistemologies of Data in Paleontology, 1800–2000,” Journal of 

the History of Biology 46, no. 3 (August 1, 2013): 401–444; on the larger historical dimension of “data-

driven” science, see: Bruno J. Strasser, “Data-Driven Sciences: From Wonder Cabinets to Electronic 

Databases,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 43, no. 1 (2012): 85–

87. 



 History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 70 
 

 

 

overcome the interconnected difficulties of heterogeneous data sets and the lack of 

convincing causal models. This ultimately meant that the very broad approach towards 

what counted as climatological evidence from the second half of the nineteenth century – 

exemplified by Brückner’s study on climatic cycles – was challenged by a more delimited 

approach in the first half of the twentieth century, frequently modeled on the work of 

Vilhelm Bjerknes and his colleagues on atmospheric dynamics.  

Meanwhile, other climatologists went further in different, and sometimes opposite, 

directions, focusing on the earth-bound and historical dimension of their discipline. Some, 

like Ellsworth Huntington, Willy Hellpach, and Brückner’s teacher and collaborator 

Albrecht Penck, embraced and further developed long-standing notions of climate-culture 

links, combining climatological, geographical, and evolutionary ideas into 

environmentally deterministic models of human – and occasionally of racial – 

development. The geographic approaches to climatic issues did not wane in the first half 

of the twentieth century. But they were beginning to be scrutinized and challenged by the 

growing calls for new dynamic-physical approaches throughout the first half of the 

twentieth century and beyond. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgements 

Preliminary drafts and early versions of this paper were presented at the “Climate in 

Meteorology, Meteorology in Climate Studies” workshop in Bergen, during the annual 

meetings of the History of Science Society and the American Society for Environmental 

History, and in the Department II colloquium of the Max Planck Institute for the History 

of Science. I would like to thank all participants for their helpful feedback and 

suggestions. I am particularly indebted to Emily Brock, Mark Carey, Gunnar Ellingsen, 

Sabina Leonelli, Magnus Vollset, and the anonymous reviewers of History of 

Meteorology for their insightful comments and their valuable advice.  


