Christian Pfister (Swiss historian)

He is particularly known for the further development of the Pfister climate indices, named after him, into a powerful instrument for the reconstruction of approximate values for temperatures and precipitation from historical documents.

(...) The results obtained from Climate History, especially those concerning extreme events, contribute to improving risk assessment by broadening the basis of statistics.

In this context, Pfister led a research group that gathered documentary data from all over Europe to reconstruct monthly weather charts for the period 1675–1715.

In this context, he adapted the Climhist software package, developed for the documentation of the "Climate History of Switzerland" (1984), to create the European database Euro-Climhist.

[6] 3 Since Erich Keyser’s Population History of Germany (Leipzig, 1938) no synthesis had been written for German speaking areas in the Early Modern Period.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Christian Pfister took on the task of collecting and compiling a hardly comprehensible number of small-scale, at best regional and heterogeneous studies worked out over half a century, and to press them into the framework of a small volume of the Encyclopaedia of German History.

Both Christian Pfister’s dissertation (1974) and his habilitation thesis (1984) were committed to the histoire totale of the Annales School in addition to climate history.

Pfister’s monograph "Im Strom der Modernisierung" (Bern, 1995) meets the methodological postulate of a histoire totale with extraordinary precision and spatial-temporal differentiation; and can be regarded as a material history in the best sense of the word, in which energy sources and food, agricultural production methods and their modernization appear just as much as the people who give birth, eat, work, argue, invent, try, age and die, and are not only processed into statistical series of numbers.

His thesis is that the current urgency of the climate problem and the glut of plastic waste is due to the flooding of markets with cheap oil from the late 1950s onwards.