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Das Wetter kontrollieren
(2021)
While estimated numbers of past and future climate migrants are alarming, the growing empirical evidence suggests that the association between adverse climate-related events and migration is not universally positive. This dissertation seeks to advance our understanding of when and how climate migration emerges by analyzing heterogeneous climatic influences on migration in low- and middle-income countries. To this end, it draws on established economic theories of migration, datasets from physical and social sciences, causal inference techniques and approaches from systematic literature review. In three of its five chapters, I estimate causal effects of processes of climate change on inequality and migration in India and Sub-Saharan Africa. By employing interaction terms and by analyzing sub-samples of data, I explore how these relationships differ for various segments of the population. In the remaining two chapters, I present two systematic literature reviews. First, I undertake a comprehensive meta-regression analysis of the econometric climate migration literature to summarize general climate migration patterns and explain the conflicting findings. Second, motivated by the broad range of approaches in the field, I examine the literature from a methodological perspective to provide best practice guidelines for studying climate migration empirically. Overall, the evidence from this dissertation shows that climatic influences on human migration are highly heterogeneous. Whether adverse climate-related impacts materialize in migration depends on the socio-economic characteristics of the individual households, such as wealth, level of education, agricultural dependence or access to adaptation technologies and insurance. For instance, I show that while adverse climatic shocks are generally associated with an increase in migration in rural India, they reduce migration in the agricultural context of Sub-Saharan Africa, where the average wealth levels are much lower so that households largely cannot afford the upfront costs of moving. I find that unlike local climatic shocks which primarily enhance internal migration to cities and hence accelerate urbanization, shocks transmitted via agricultural producer prices increase migration to neighboring countries, likely due to the simultaneous decrease in real income in nearby urban areas. These findings advance our current understanding by showing when and how economic agents respond to climatic events, thus providing explicit contexts and mechanisms of climate change effects on migration in the future. The resulting collection of findings can guide policy interventions to avoid or mitigate any present and future welfare losses from climate change-related migration choices.
Shakespeares Meteopoetik
(2021)
Shakespeare war zweifellos ›Meteopoet‹. Obwohl es die frühneuzeitliche Bühne, die ohne Kulisse, künstliches Licht und mit nur sehr beschränkten Requisiten auskam, vor allerhand Darstellungsprobleme stellen musste, bilden Wetterereignisse einen festen Bestandteil vieler seiner Dramen. Der über sechs Szenen andauernde Bühnensturm aus King Lear gehört zu den berühmtesten meteorologischen Momenten der westlichen Literatur. Schon in Julius Caesar, etwa sieben Jahre zuvor entstanden, leitet die Bühnenanweisung »Thunder and lightning« (JC 1.3; JC 2.2) ein sich über mehrere Auftritte erstreckendes Unwetter ein, das mit den damaligen Mitteln auf der Bühne inszeniert werden musste: Vermutlich kamen dabei in Holztrögen oder direkt auf dem die Bühne überspannenden Dachboden gerollte Kanonenkugeln und an Fäden geführte Feuerwerkskörper zum Einsatz, die Donner und Blitz simulierten. So auch in der Macbeth eröffnenden Hexenszene, zumindest lässt darauf die identische Bühnenanweisung schließen. Dass dieses Bühnenwetter hier nicht nur die übernatürliche Atmosphäre unterstützt, sondern tatsächlich auch meteorologisch relevant ist, verdeutlichen zwei Hinweise: Zum einen erfahren wir von Macbeth später selbst, dass er und seine Zeitgenossen den Hexen tatsächlich die Fähigkeit zuschrieben, das Wetter zu machen:
»Though you untie the winds, and let them fight / Against the churches« (Mac 4.1.52–53), ruft er den Hexen entgegen – es antworten drei Donnerschläge. Zum anderen berichten zwei Randfiguren von einem außergewöhnlichen Unwetter, das
just in der Nacht, in der Macbeth Duncan ermordet, gewütet hatte: »The night has been unruly: where we lay / The chimneys were blown down« (Mac 2.3.54–55), erzählt Lennox, eine Szene später ergänzt ein alter Mann, dass er zu seinen Lebzeiten keine vergleichbare »sore night« (Mac 2.4.3) gesehen habe. Wetterschilderungen vergleichbarer Art begegnen auch in Othello.
The article is dedicated to the role of weather in Shakespeare’s tragedies. It traces a dense net of weather instances – stage weather, narrated weather events, weather imagery – throughout his plays, and attempts to reconstruct the weather’s structural implications for the tragedy genre. The way early modern humoral pathology understood the weather’s influence on the humours of the human body – of which Shakespeare’s plays themselves give evidence – provides the background for reconstructing the function of the weather as a source of tragic force. Its turbulence not only infects the characters in the play and thereby drives the plot, but also transgresses the boundaries of the fictional world and affects spectators in the auditorium.