Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change is today transforming Earth’s oceans with alarming speed, imperiling the fate of all of us on land. Preindustrial and overwhelmingly natural climate changes were, in the Holocene, far smaller in scale and speed than those of today. Yet they too reshaped the oceans and thereby powerfully influenced historical societies. This short essay aims to inspire a new wave of scholarship on the social impacts of past climate change at sea by introducing environmental historians to the rich and still largely underexploited treasure trove of sources that make such work possible. It describes these sources and their relative merits; explains how they can be used to identify, or “reconstruct,” periods of past climate change; and shows how they may be used to reveal human responses to those changes. It devotes special attention to the preindustrial period, for which scholarship is especially scant, and to textual evidence from archives in Europe and North America, which is plentiful as early as the seventeenth century. Uniquely, it shows how these sources may be used to write environmental histories of the oceans.

中文翻译：

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资料来源：海上气候变化的文字记录

摘要

今天，人为的气候变化正以惊人的速度改变着地球的海洋，危及了我们所有人在陆地上的命运。在全新世，工业化之前和压倒性的自然气候变化的规模和速度远小于今天。然而，它们也重塑了海洋，从而对历史社会产生了巨大影响。这篇简短的文章旨在通过将环境历史学家介绍给富有但仍未充分开发的资源宝库来激发人们对过去气候变化对海洋造成的社会影响的新一波学术研究。它描述了这些来源及其相对优点；解释如何将其用于识别或“重建”过去的气候变化时期；并说明如何使用它们来揭示人类对这些变化的反应。它特别关注工业化前的时期，该时期的学术尤为稀少，并特别关注早在十七世纪的欧洲和北美档案中的文字证据。它独特地展示了如何使用这些资源来撰写海洋的环境历史。