Paper short abstract:

Today's institutions and politics of climate science have a lot in common with European meteorological campaigns at the eve of the First World War. I will focus on the establishment of German upper atmospheric weather stations and expeditions from the Atlantic to the Arctic, ca. 1900-1930.

Paper long abstract:

Scientific diplomacy often has a predilection for international institutions and peaceful intentions. However, today's 'vast machine of climate science' is not only the result of formal international cooperation, but also the result of ad hoc diplomacy, conflict and colonialism within the context of a continuously shifting global balance of power.

Although some would like to see the rivalry between the US and China as a new Cold War, the current geopolitical multilateral environment often looks very similar to the era before the 1930s. In my paper I will not only focus on several aerological expeditions, but also on the establishment of several German aerological stations in the Atlantic (Tenerife, Ottoman Empire) and the Arctic (Svalbard, Greenland) between the beginning of the twentieth century to the period of the World Wars. German imperialism -even during the Weimar period- was not so much a top down process emanating from Berlin, but a bottom-up result of competing meteorological institutions in the Germanspeaking world, sometimes creating alliances with other European powers (such as Spain, the prince of Monaco, the Ottoman Empire, and even France) and sometimes in conflict with them. But it was always about colonizing the atmosphere.

Before planes, weather balloons created a new political environment of the upper air in the same way that satellites and computers opened up space and cyberspace. I will draw comparisons between China as an emerging global actor in the North and its connected trade routes and Germany's political role at the beginning of the twentieth century.