SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Thoreau Is Rediscovered as a Climatologist
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
CONCORD, Mass.—Henry David Thoreau endorsed civil disobedience, opposed slavery and lived for two years in a hut in the woods here, an experience he described in “Walden.” Now he turns out to have another line in his résumé: climate researcher.
He did not realize it, of course. Thoreau died in 1862, when the industrial revolution was just beginning to pump climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 1851, when he started recording when and where plants flowered in Concord, he was making notes for a book on the seasons.
Now, though, researchers at Boston University and Harvard are using those notes to discern patterns of plant abundance and decline in Concord—and by extension, New England—and to link those patterns to changing climate.
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