George Adamson

King's College London, Geography, Faculty Member

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My research is situated at the boundary between environmental history, natural disasters management and responses, human-environment interactions and climatology, with a particular focus on South Asia. My research is focussed on climate-society interactions and climate reconstruction; this comprises of several aspects: extension of the climatic record using documentary proxies, explorations of climatic vulnerability and adaptability, particularly at the institutional level, analyses narratives of climatic knowledge through time.

My work contributes to an understanding of the drivers of climatic vulnerability in a wider context, particularly under non-democratic governance systems. Particularly, my research on acclimatisation discourse is adding to a growing body of research on cultural narratives of climate, exemplified by the recent AHRC-funded network "Cultural Spaces of Climate". My quantitative research is shedding light on the relationship between tropical rainfall and El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on multi-decadal timescales. At the moment I am also particularly interested in the ways that historical analysis can inform disaster management and climate adaptation policy, particularly the constructive intersections of socio-ecological systems theory, vulnerability approaches and historical political ecology. Recently I have been working on the monograph 'El Nino and Human History' based partly on the unfinished writings of Richard Grove, which has opened up a new interest in the cultural politics of the El Nino Southern Oscillation.

Previously, I have undertaken work on death and disease burden in South Asia related to the consumption of arsenic-contaminated groundwater.

I currently a Lecturer in Geography at King'c College London, having previously worked at the Universities of Brighton and Sussex. I am also an affiliate of the Centre for World Environmental History at the University of Sussex. I am co-coordinator or the new MA Climate Change: History, Culture, Society at King's College London.

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Papers by George Adamson

Weather pattern definitions for India and their daily historical classifications (1979 to 2016)

Climate history of Asia (excluding China)

As the largest landmass on Earth, Asia’s climatic history is of paramount importance. However, wi... more As the largest landmass on Earth, Asia’s climatic history is of paramount importance. However, with the exception of China, research on the historical climatology of the continent remains in its infancy. Climate reconstructions using Islamic sources have been undertaken for Arabia and West Asia, particularly for the first millennium ce. For the Indian subcontinent, reconstruction has primarily used colonial sources, so information about past climatic variability exists mainly for the last three centuries. For Indonesia, colonial records have substantial potential, having been used previously only to compile disaster chronologies. Documentary reconstruction in Russia is minimal, with the exception of a review produced by Borisenkov in 1992. Climate reconstruction is far more advanced in Japan, including highly robust long-term temperature reconstructions from the dates of spring flowering and lake ice records.

El Niño and Society

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science

The El Niño Southern Oscillation is considered to be the most significant form of “natural” clima... more The El Niño Southern Oscillation is considered to be the most significant form of “natural” climate variability, although its definition and the scientific understanding of the phenomenon are continually evolving. Since its first recorded usage in 1891, the meaning of “El Niño” has morphed from a regular local current affecting coastal Peru, to an occasional Pacific-wide phenomenon that modifies weather patterns throughout the world, and finally to a diversity of weather patterns that share similarities in Pacific heating and changes in trade-wind intensity, but exhibit considerable variation in other ways. Since the 1960s El Niño has been associated with the Southern Oscillation, originally defined as a statistical relationship in pressure patterns across the Pacific by the British-Indian scientist Gilbert Walker. The first unified model for the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was developed by Jacob Bjerknes in 1969 and it has been updated several times since, but no simple mod...

The Discovery of ENSO

Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History

The Southern Oscillation was named in 1924 and its discovery can be traced back to colonial attem... more The Southern Oscillation was named in 1924 and its discovery can be traced back to colonial attempts to forecast the Indian monsoon in the late-nineteenth century. The first use of the name ‘El Nino’ to describe a climatic phenomenon appeared in South America in 1893. The term did not, however, originally mean what it does today, being used to describe a seasonal warm water current that is manifest off the coast of northwestern Peru. The history of these two distinct phenomena and their eventual amalgamation into ENSO is closely linked to the activities of the international Guano industry and to efforts to strengthen US soft power in Latin America during the Cold War. Significant advances in El Nino forecasting have occurred since the 1982 event.

El Niño in the Twentieth Century

Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History

This chapter addresses El Nino’s impact in the twentieth century, a century for which description... more This chapter addresses El Nino’s impact in the twentieth century, a century for which descriptions are uniquely detailed. The El Ninos in the twentieth century that are perhaps best known are 1982–1983 and 1997–1998, respectively the first event to attract global news coverage and the first to be correctly forecast. The El Nino of 1924–1925 is significant as the first to attract international scientific interest. Other El Ninos were notable for associated mortality: the El Nino of 1941–1942 was responsible for the last major famine in the Indian subcontinent and the El Nino of 1972–1973 brought drought and famine to the Sahel. In general, though, the twentieth century was notable for a significant reduction in mortality due to meteorological extremes associated with El Nino.

El Niño in Prehistory

Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History

A western Pacific sediment core provides us with an indication of the early activity of the Holoc... more A western Pacific sediment core provides us with an indication of the early activity of the Holocene El Nino. Stronger activity is evident around 4200, 3700 and 3300 BP. These first periods of severe El Ninos correspond with a number of significant droughts that affected major northern hemisphere civilisations, especially in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The earliest literate societies, particularly those of Ancient Egypt, have left us with a clear impression of the colossal impact of these droughts: in 2200–1850, 1500–1650 and 1150–1250 BCE. A further series of droughts between 500 and 900 CE also had catastrophic impacts on human populations in India and the Americas, during a period that has been termed the ‘Dark Ages’. In all cases El Nino is highly implicated.

The Influence of El Niño on World Crises in the Nineteenth Century

Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History

The impact of El Nino events from the time of the French Revolution to the present day raises wid... more The impact of El Nino events from the time of the French Revolution to the present day raises wider issues about the connections between climatic events, social disruption and revolution when one examines the colonial context. The new structures of colonialism and western economic penetration that occurred during the nineteenth century significantly affected vulnerability to El Nino events within colonised populations in drought-prone regions. Although people had always died in droughts in India or Africa, for example, the new governing structures often significantly challenged traditional responses to drought. As a result, in several regions mortality figures during El Nino-caused droughts during the nineteenth century increased above earlier levels. The nineteenth century, though, may have marked the culmination of global El Nino-related mortality.

Imperial Oscillations

Weather, Climate, and the Geographical Imagination

El Niño in the Public Imagination

Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History

El Nino is often described in the media as a universal scourge that brings nothing but destructio... more El Nino is often described in the media as a universal scourge that brings nothing but destruction. The last 40 years may, however, be the only period in human history where this description is not correct. This is because the El Nino presented in the media is not the physical phenomenon; it is instead an idea of El Nino, what might be termed ‘El Nino in the public imagination’. This idea is enabled by uncertainties within the science of El Nino and reinforced by the names ‘El Nino’ and ‘La Nina’, which provide a gender and personality. This chapter argues that, since the end of the twentieth century, the idea of El Nino has had as important an effect on society as the phenomenon itself.

El Niño Chronology and the Little Ice Age

Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History

Thanks to the work of Hubert Lamb the effect of climate on society in the Little Ice Age (LIA) is... more Thanks to the work of Hubert Lamb the effect of climate on society in the Little Ice Age (LIA) is well known in temperate latitudes. The subtropical and tropical history of the LIA and its El Nino events is far less analysed or documented. It does seem clear that the most severe drought periods in Asia and elsewhere (especially Africa) that were manifest during the LIA were associated almost exclusively with what we consider to have been El Nino events. In this way we are then able to ask the question: what happened in the tropics, and especially in Asia, during the El Nino events of the LIA, and what does this mean in terms of understanding the history of economic patterns and human crises?

The role of gender in peer-group perceptions of climate scientists’ media statements

Public Understanding of Science

This research explores whether environmental scientists perceive their male and female peers diff... more This research explores whether environmental scientists perceive their male and female peers differently when making statements in the media including policy advocacy. Environmental scientists in the United Kingdom were provided with a media statement by a fictitious scientist containing a mixture of scientific information and advocacy, and asked to rate the statement against various attributes. Attributes were designed to represent stereotypes associated with male and female tendencies, and with science (impartial objectivity) and the media (dramatic narrative). The statements were randomly assigned to one of two male and two female scientists. Where the statements were attributed to a female scientist, male environmental scientists rated the fictitious scientist as significantly more ‘dramatic’ and ‘biased’ than their female counterparts did. These gendered attributes are typically held as contrary to the norms of science, suggesting an implicit bias among male scientists when rev...

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Climate indices in historical climate reconstructions: a global state of the art

Climate of the Past

D. J. Nash et al.: Climate indices in historical climate reconstructions and Australia) as well a... more D. J. Nash et al.: Climate indices in historical climate reconstructions and Australia) as well as the world's oceans. We then outline the different methods by which indices are developed in each of these regions, including a discussion of the processes adopted to verify and calibrate index series, and the measures used to express confidence and uncertainty. We conclude with a series of recommendations to guide the development of future index-based climate reconstructions to maximise their effectiveness for use by climate modellers and in multiproxy climate reconstructions.

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Climate indices in historical climate reconstructions: a global state of the art

Climate of the Past, 2021

Narrative evidence contained within historical documents and inscriptions provides an important r... more Narrative evidence contained within historical documents and inscriptions provides an important record of climate variability for periods prior to the onset of systematic meteorological data collection. A common approach used by historical climatologists to convert such qualitative information into continuous quantitative proxy data is through the generation of ordinal-scale climate indices. There is, however, considerable variability in the types of phenomena reconstructed using an index approach and the practice of index development in different parts of the world. This review, written by members of the PAGES (Past Global Changes) CRIAS working group – a collective of climate historians and historical climatologists researching Climate Reconstructions and Impacts from the Archives of Societies – provides the first global synthesis of the use of the index approach in climate reconstruction. We begin by summarising the range of studies that have used indices for climate reconstructi...

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Deriving optimal weather pattern definitions for the representation of precipitation variability over India

International Journal of Climatology

This study utilizes cluster analysis to produce sets of weather patterns for the Indian subcontin... more This study utilizes cluster analysis to produce sets of weather patterns for the Indian subcontinent. These patterns have been developed with future applications in mind; specifically relating to the occurrence of high-impact weather and meteorologically induced hazards such as landslides. The weather patterns are also suited for use within probabilistic medium-to long-range weather pattern forecasting tools driven by ensemble prediction systems. A total of 192 sets of weather patterns have been generated by varying the parameter which is clustered, the spatial domain and the number of weather patterns. Non-hierarchical k-means clustering was applied to daily 1200 UTC ERA-Interim reanalysis data between 1979 and 2016 using pressure at mean sea level (PMSL) and u-and v-component winds at 10-m, 925-hPa and 850-hPa. The resultant weather pattern sets (clusters) were analysed for their ability to represent the main climatic precipitation patterns over India using the explained variation score. Weather patterns generated using 850-hPa winds are among the most representative, with 30 patterns being enough to represent variability within different phases of the Indian climate. For example, several weather pattern variants are evident within the active monsoon, break monsoon and retreating monsoon. There are also several variants of weather patterns susceptible to western disturbances. These weather pattern variants are useful when it comes to identifying periods most susceptible to high-impact weather within a large-scale regime, such as identifying the most flood prone periods within the active monsoon. They hence have potentially many forecasting applications.

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El Niño in World History

Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History

Rainfall variability in present-day KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, during the nineteenth century

Quaternary International, 2016

Natural Disasters and Indian History. Oxford University Press, New Delhi (2012), Oxford India Short Introductions, xii + 165 pages, £7.99 paperback

Journal of Historical Geography, 2013

Natural Disasters and Indian History

Journal of Historical Geography, 2014

xii þ 165 pages, £7.99 paperback.

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Research Statement for Conference at University of Sussex

Situating El Niño: Toward a Critical (Physical) Geography of ENSO Research Practice

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Modes of climate variability such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have important impli... more Modes of climate variability such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have important implications for how climate risks are understood and prepared for. This article establishes a new critical geography of ENSO research practice through examination of the production of ENSO science in three U.S. research centers, chosen for their dominance in ENSO knowledge production and their location outside of "teleconnection" regions. Scientists in these institutions revealed multiple and sometimes conflicting conceptualizations of ENSO and expressed disagreement over which components are most significant for research and wider society. Yet two factors are revealed that tend ENSO science toward the reductive: the increasing conceptualization of ENSO as a modeling problem associated with the importance of general circulation models and an institutional drive for simplicity in indexes and definitions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Both have implications for disaster management and the broader geographies of risk, by reducing a multifaceted phenomenon into a set of indexes, definitions, and methodologies. The article thus argues for a new research agenda on the critical geographies of ENSO research practice, particularly focusing on the role of institutional priorities in constraining the practice and presentation of science.

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George Adamson

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