Melissa Charenko studies scientists’ attempts to understand climate change and its implications. Her current book project, Climate by Proxy, traces how scientists read the record of past climate. It focuses on those who reconstructed the past using organic and inorganic remains such as tree rings, pollen, and ice cores. These proxies indirectly record the ebb and flow of climate over thousands of years. Scientists needed to develop techniques to interpret this record. Once they did, they then used it to explain human history and destiny. Climate by Proxy demonstrates how material objects worked with scientists’ perceptions of human groups to compel, constrain, and reinforce their understandings of climate, history, and the future.
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison