Climates on the Move

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This dissertation examines the role of climate science in ensuring environmental stability. It traces the career of the climatologist Charles Warren Thornthwaite, beginning with his work as a population geographer for the Social Science Research Council in the early 1930s and ending in the early 1960s with his work as an independent consultant for the military, agribusiness firms, and international organizations. I argue that Thornthwaite's approach to environmental stability began as an effort to create "holistic" stability, one characterized by a relative continuity of the relationships of people to the land they inhabited, and evolved into approach that favored "mechanistic" stability, one characterized by the interaction and exchange discrete environmental factors--energy, water, crops, etc.