I’ll address these questions in separate parts as they require longer answers than I have been giving.
#1: From this week’s readings, it is quite apparent that the gap between what we perceive/know about the climate has changed quite drastically since the Enlightenment. Environmental consciousness has been around for far longer than we tend to acknowledge and the Coen reading points out that in the 15th century, people (probably Europeans?) observed natural disasters/events as something “the result of a natural, causal chain of events that began with human sinfulness”. Although they were not as knowledgeable about how and why climate changes occurred, they did recognize—especially in the 18th century—that understanding seasonal changes and temperatures shifts was important enough. The Coen reading also points out that it wasn’t until the 1800s that we truly started to investigate what exactly climate was and developed many different ways of speaking of it. People became interested in the climate because of how it impacted human health, politics (aka empire building), and things like that. The idea that there was a actually a problem and that we have a climate crisis did not fully form until later years as scientists did not have all the information to truly know what damaged was being done by colonialism/capitalism. One thing that has remained the same from the Enlightenment time to now is that Earth undergoes changes that are nonhuman, but they can be the result of human action. In the enlightenment they may have said it was from human sinfulness and that’s lowkey pretty true (ex: greed and gluttony).
#2. I think the first thing that pops into my head when I think about the impacts of colonialism and how we have developed our current climate models is this idea of controlling nature. Having power over the land through mutilation and monopoly over resources seems to be a common trend in older Western ways of thinking. Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing have been overlooked, as we don’t see ourselves as part of the system in nature. Western thinkers believe they are above ‘the wilderness’.
#3. I think the story of “human sciences” helps us understand the history of climate science a bit better because once we began to identify the differences between psychology/anthropology/other fields, we could see our impacts more clearly. Before we developed a better understanding of climate change, any environmental change or natural phenomenon could be chalked up to some unexplainable phenomenon. There was no fear that Earth was headed in a direction that was irreversible because we didn’t know that our actions do in fact, have consequences.