This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the testimonia and fragments of the much-travelled Poseidonios of Apameia (c.135–c.51 BC), selected for their geographical content and arranged as 75 extracts. (Translations of passages of Strabo are adapted with permission from the work of D. W. Roller, and a lengthy passage of Priscianus Lydus from the translation by I. G. Kidd.) The chapter introduction notes the bias introduced into our understanding of Poseidonios’ geography by the particular interests of Strabo and Athenaios, the commonest sources of extracts; and demonstrates Poseidonios’ achievement in integrating cosmology, philosophy, and geographical thought. Prominent advances made by his writing are in areas such as the tides, climatic zones, and the interaction of humankind with the natural environment.

This chapter examines connections between climatic determinist accounts of civilization and the tendency toward climate reductionism in recent writings on climate change and future societal collapse. It examines the writings of a sequence of key historical figures, notably, Hippocrates, Ibn Khaldūn, Montesquieu, and Buckle. Thereafter the work of a range of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American writers including the chemist-historian John William Draper, geographers Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Semple, and medical practitioners William Petersen and Clarence Mills are reviewed. Scrutiny of their pronouncements reveals the intimate connections such figures perceived between climate and health, wealth, war, eugenics, temperament, and civilization more generally. The essay foregrounds continuities between these proposals and the writings of some contemporary commentators on climate and economics, and on the implications of climate change for the future of human society.

This chapter first explores how early medieval writers, and especially Isidore and Bede, made fundamental contributions to a new understanding of the natural world and its workings. They both quarried classical works for factual information and empirical observations, and placed these within a Christian cosmological model. An outline is given of the monastic science of ‘computus’, which was fundamental for teaching on natural philosophy and for theories about the weather in particular. Summaries of introductory works by both Isidore and Bede demonstrate their respective meteorological models; Bede’s views on the powers of the planets are covered in detail. Special attention is given to Bede’s The Reckoning of Time and the complex information on astronomy and meteorology which it expounds. An important conclusion is that Bede produced an understanding of weather as the intelligible and predictable result of astronomical and climatic factors. Overall, the chapter argues that classically derived natural philosophy and Christian cosmology were successfully integrated, and that the two together provided the basis for a new approach to weather and its prediction.