The idea of climate change caused by human or by natural factors emerged gradually over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historical climatology appeared at that time: old weather records, historical sources, ancient vegetation, and the evolution of rivers and glaciers were considered as resources for the study of climate change. As early as 1671, Robert Boyle recommended climate change as a topic of investigation for instrumental meteorology. Several circumstances have contributed to the historicization of climate: the colonization of North America and the comparison of different climates at the same latitude across the Atlantic; the development of a historical discourse connecting the progress of civilization with climatic improvement; the Enlightenment projects of climate improvement; the desire to solve the riddle of astro-meteorological cycles; and finally the emergence of a historicist conception of nature (geology and theories of the Earth). The influential theories of Richard Grove and Dipesh Chakrabarty on the links between history, climate, and the environmental reflexivity of past societies are reexamined in this article.