Robert Luke Naylor

The University of Manchester · Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM)

The role of editorial staff in shaping early climate change narratives has been underexplored and deserves more attention. During the 1970s, the epistemological underpinnings of the production of knowledge on climate change were contested between scientists who favoured computer-based atmospheric simulations and those who were more interested in in...

This report explores the motivations behind Rockefeller Foundation (RF) support for climate change research in the 1970s. I argue that such support stemmed from the presidency of John H. Knowles, who led attempts to reform RF’s image in response to challenges of the 1960s such as the 1969 Tax Reform Act. As a result, RF funded interdisciplinary con...

In the mid-twentieth century, the identity of those who oversaw the UK electricity grid tentatively and slowly began to shift from those who joined the electricity industry directly from secondary school to a university-educated elite with a higher level of technical education. At the same time, electricity infrastructure became increasingly centra...

Despite apocalyptic discourse surrounding climate change since the 1970s, climate and weather have a longer history of being conceptualized as useful entities in the Anglophone world. The adversities of the Great Depression and hopes for a better postwar future led to climate being designated as a limitless resource—an object integral to the nation...

During the first half of the 1970s, climate research gained a new significance and began to be perceived within political and academic circles as being worthy of public support. Conventional explanations for this increased status include a series of climate anomalies that generated awareness and heightened concern over the potentially devastating e...

This article contributes towards scholarship on teaching environmental history by analysing a series (Chernobyl, 2019) and film (Dark Waters, 2019). It argues that the immediacy of such media offer an ideal entry point into environmental history and history of science for students first studying those subjects. As well, it provides a model for how...

The boundaries and intersections between physics and philosophy remain contested, both within academia and among wider publics. To understand these contentions and to work toward resolving them, it is important to ask how we arrived at a place where a considerable proportion of the physics community rejects philosophy and those who practice it. Is...

The social contributors to the formation of expertise are often a taboo subject when practitioner communities interact with outsiders, making the exploration of these inputs a difficult endeavour. When exploring scientific communities, one resource that many STS and HSTM scholars can draw from is their personal experience as students of science – e...

The famine in the Western Sahel that made international headlines in the early 1970s was one of the first major post-colonial disasters, and set the tone for Western engagement in the region throughout the following decades. It was also one of the earliest events that was decisively linked with narratives of global climatic change, helping to prope...

Reid Allen Bryson (1920–2008) was a forceful orator who consistently fought against institutional pressures to get his messages out to the public. In the 1960s, Bryson was a leader in the wider academic turn toward politically charged interdisciplinarianism. To the dismay of many of his colleagues, he publicly made climatological prognoses in the 1...

The infection pattern of a mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic in the Black Hills National Forest (BHNF) was extracted from National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) aerial photography data via the application of pixel colour analysis and texture functions. From initial analysis, local percolation clusters were identified. Epidemic simulations we...