ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a retrospective analysis of Joseph Banks's impulsive push to reenergize Arctic exploration in the early nineteenth century by examining how a range of long-established and on-going scientific inquiries into climate change informed his actions. From the early modern period and through the eighteenth century, imperial European states sustained an avowed interest in gathering knowledge about distant climates, but it was mainly local colonial officials and naturalists who were the most prolific promoters of ideas about climate change. Banks was well versed in Buffon's grand view of climate history and learned debates about its merits. The most prevalent argument in the English Empire was that economic improvement had destabilized regional climates, changes that seemed particularly conspicuous in rapidly developing colonies in the Northern Hemisphere's temperate zones. By the end of the eighteenth century, these and other conjectures about climate change had become a standard part of scientific correspondence, debate, and land management across the Atlantic world.
