Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and national geographies rather than the utopian ideals of scientists and
well-meaning U.N. bureaucrats.
The difficulties that scientists faced in introducing CO
2
into the frame-
work of international environmental governance developed at Stockholm
reflected the familiar intractability of the problem itself, and the confer-
ence revealed the limits of the science-first advocacy that scientists had
developed to address CO
2
and climate change domestically. These diffi-
culties also reflected the complexities of a changing geopolitical context,
a new iteration of the Cold War's influence on the history of global warm-
ing. Articulating CO
2
and climate change as an environmental problem
presented new and sometimes unexpected challenges in a political con-
text defined by international development and national sovereignty. What
made CO
2
appealing as a global scientific problem also made it difficult to
incorporate into the politically negotiated vision of global environmental
governance developed at Stockholm. In the end, the Stockholm Confer-
ence was a challenging place to talk meaningfully about CO
2
. Even so,
many of the seemingly tangential discussions about global environmental
governance that occurred at Stockholm are vital to understanding global
warming politics since then. The tortuous politics of the global environ-
ment forged at the conference would be woven into the history of CO
2
for
decades to come.
climate, systems science,
and the gloBal environment
In its simplest and most literal definition, the term
global environment
is
meaninglessly vague. Etymologically, it would be difficult to conceive of
two more general words. From the French
environ,
or “to form a ring around,
surround, encircle,”
environment
simply means “that which environs; the
objects or the region surrounding anything.”
Global,
meanwhile, from
the Latin
globus,
is an adjective describing a round mass, ball, or sphere,
although it has also come, after the French usage, to describe a thing or
set of things in their comprehensive, all-encompassing, or unified totality.
More recently, beginning in the late nineteenth century,
global
began to
pertain more specifically to things whole, worldwide, or universal. So in a
sense, the global environment is nothing less than the unified and univer-
sal totality of all those things that surround or influence, well, everything.
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