HEAT: A HISTORY
On Barak, TAU
Please join us for our next Monday departmental seminar on the 24th of April from 15:00 to 16:00 at the Porter Auditorium
HEAT: A HISTORY
On Barak, TAU
Abstract
The world is on fire but for some reason we cannot sense the heat. Even the established myth of the frog who fails to understand the danger even as it slowly boils to death in a saucepan has been dispelled by studies in thermoregulation and by laboratory frogs leaping out of pots. So how can we explain that, even as the flames lick their feet, most people have yet to grasp the full gravity of environmental overheating, let alone leap into action? What acquired habits and socio-technical elements allow humans to simmer with an oblivious grin? In a new book project I attribute responsibility to modern forms of climatization and to scientific abstractions used to explain the climate. Widespread use of air conditioners, changes in urban planning, mobility, clothing, and even new attitudes towards sweat were short-term solutions to escaping the heat in hotspots such as the twentieth-century Middle East. However, all these have ultimately fueled collective myopia regarding the impact of rising temperatures. Added to this shortsightedness is the disconnect between abstract scientific formulations and actual human experience that suggested climate change is a concern for the future rather than a burning problem in the present
Bio
I am a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-Western settings. I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, and the author of three books: Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (University of California Press, 2020), On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2013), and Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room (Uppsala University Press, 2006). At Tel Aviv University I co-head the Laboratory for the History of the Climate Crisis
Alon Shepon
The Department of Environmental Studies
The Porter School of the Environment and Earth Science
Tel Aviv University | website
The Israeli Forum for Sustainable Nutrition
