Catherine Peters discusses how writers such as the Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano reworked the Romantic trope of the revolutionary “common wind” to forge kinship networks among forcibly displaced peoples. In formulating this argument, Peters shifts the conventional focus on the French Revolution as the hub of radical Romantic thought to the Haitian Revolution, where “fraternité” refers not to an abstract ideal but a very real desire to reconstitute those family relations disrupted by the institution of slavery.

The Mediterranean boat crossing highlights vulnerability and risk along migrants’ unauthorized journeys. This chapter attends to migrants’ experiences of taking a boat from Libya to Europe. The chapter enlivens affective and meteorological dimensions of the crossing to show how they configure mobilities and peoples’ futures. It provides a unique insight into unauthorized migration and its intersections with affect and atmospheres.

The 1890s have a special significance in the literary history of the Anthropocene, and the fin de siècle has traditionally been understood as a moment when artifice triumphed over nature. Reexamining the period today, we can instead see how literature and art of the 1890s reckons with the idea of an indeterminate nature without design, purpose, or end – a nature profoundly shaped by human forces and yet beyond human reckoning and control. The concentrated finitude of the era, as framed in literary and historical study, actually reflects the period’s own grasp of the finitudes and vicissitudes of the natural world. This chapter aims to tease out the environmental and ecological inheritance of the decadent 1890s while simultaneously teasing apart the complex conceptual contestation among rival assaults on the category of the “natural” in the 1890s, assaults that can be roughly grouped around Oscar Wilde’s 1895 denaturalizing of heterosexuality and Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 denaturalizing of the atmosphere in his landmark essay “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”

An overview of optical scattering in the atmosphere includes the sizes and concentration of scatterers, the mathematical formalism of scattering, and definitions of the lidar scattering and extinction coefficients. The Rayleigh, Mie, and geometric scattering regimes are defined by the scattering parameter, and implications of Rayleigh scattering on lidar measurements are elucidated for both signals and background. Molecules store energy in translational, rotational, and vibrational motions, and atoms store energy in electronic excitations. These energy storage mechanisms cause the lidar observables of Doppler shifts, molecular and Raman spectra, and atomic spectra, which, along with Rayleigh scattering, enable lidar measurements of temperatures and winds; water vapor and trace gas concentrations; and aerosol extinction coefficients at altitudes from the surface up to the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The lidar techniques that exploit all these phenomena operate over a range of wavelengths from the long wave infrared to the ultraviolet and the reasons for the differing wavelengths of the various techniques are explained with a graphic that summarizes the chapter.

A brief overview and description of the atmospheric lidar measurement technique is followed by the structure of the atmosphere in terms of the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere, as it is usually presented in atmospheric science and meteorology. The atmosphere is then described in terms of lidar observables at all altitudes, including water vapor; trace gases; clouds; several other kinds of particulate matter; and metal atoms, as well as density, temperature, and winds. Examples of lidar measurements include tropospheric and stratospheric ozone, greenhouse gases, other pollutants, tropospheric and stratospheric aerosols, polar stratospheric clouds, and atoms of sodium, potassium, calcium, and iron in the mesosphere. Finally, the structure and contents of the book are described, and suggestions for further reading are given.

This chapter reviews how literary and literal atmospheres have cut across each other in complex transactions of meaning and practice over the past 400 years. It traces how atmosphere was first literalised in early modern science, in a process that identified air as a new object of empirical knowledge while also awarding a new meaning of empirical objectivity to literalness. It then shows how this scientifically literal atmosphere was taken up in an expanded set of metaphoric and figurative uses from around 1800, in which such formulations as ‘political atmosphere’ and ‘poetic atmosphere’ breathed new life into traditional understandings of air that had moved fluidly between the spiritual and the empirical. The large-scale cultural re-metaphoricisation of air in this period formed the platform for the emergence of literary atmosphere as a specific practice of double troping, in which aerial figures were reflexively marked as at once figurative and literal. That marking proved integral to the emergence of both modernist poetry and the modern novel. But the discursive divisions and oppositions that underwrote it are brought under unprecedented pressure by climate change, which therefore requires new methods for the writing and reading of literary atmospheres.

This is our quick jog through climate science, intended to ground future climate discussions in a solid factual context. We review: the earth’s energy budget via the Trenberth diagram; the role of greenhouse gases, the Keeling Curve, and global warming potential; atmospheric structure and the environmental lapse rate; global atmospheric and oceanic circulations; paleoclimatology over both the last million and the last 1,500 years; and the role of oceans and ice.

The Anthropocene tasks literary critics and historians with rethinking literature through the lens of a civilizational catastrophe not yet fully realized but well-modeled and forecast in the IPCC reports, which describe a future planet drastically altered by greenhouse gas emissions. The hidden angle of literature is that it has always subtended a long arc from a mostly stable climate regime to the chaotic one that awaits above 400-plus ppm. Within literary texts we may find clues to explain how, in the face of a planetary emergency, we persist in our frustrating denialism (and find, too, perhaps some remedies for it). The American Renaissance is an important locus for such rereadings. This essay takes an indirect line through the central figures associated with the period (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Hawthorne), adding Dickinson, Poe, Fuller, and Susan Fenimore Cooper. The remarks on these authors’ “climate-imaginary” are mostly observational, sometimes notional, and admittedly provisional. Uncovering the climatic unconscious of the American Renaissance can only be understood as a literary version of paleoclimatology, with all the attendant gaps and uncertainties.

Craftsmanship, making and do-it-ocracy are prominent elements of the so-called new world of work. In this chapter, we describe the ‘experience of making’ in two makerspaces, one located in France and the other in the United States. In particular, we focus on three concepts – silence, atmosphere and togetherness – in order to flesh out, or make visible, the specificities of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and Do-It-Together (DIT) processes in makerspaces. We mobilise Merleau-Ponty’s work and an aesthetic perspective on time and place to delve into the experience of making. This leads us to propose the concept of New Collaborative Experiences (NCE), which we define as new modes of feeling and expressing the self and the world in a context that requires a collective production and coordination, as a way of illuminating our two ethnographic accounts.