Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
atmospheric scientists, climatologists, and other management experts to
incorporate the atmosphere— and by association, climate change— into a
scientific vision of the threatened global environment.
The first and most important study to address climate as a major envi-
ronmental issue was the 1970
Study of Critical Environmental Problems
—
the same study that addressed the atmospheric impacts of the supersonic
transport. Principally organized by Wilson, SCEP involved a veritable
Who's Who of atmospheric science, complemented by a smattering of
notable management professionals (mostly from MIT), biologists, and sci-
entific administrators from academia, government, and the private sector.
18
Wilson and his eleven-person steering committee hoped to “fill the gap” in
research into “global problems such as changes in climate and in ocean and
terrestrial ecosystems” that “had not been subjected to intensive study and
examination.” The resulting study synthesized more than two hundred
papers and scientific articles into a first assessment of “the status of the
total global environment.”
19
The SCEP group actually assessed two things. First, through working
groups on the climatic and ecological impacts of human activities, on the
implications of environmental change and remedial actions, and on agricul-
tural waste and energy production, the group outlined the major threats to
the global environment for the 1970s. The climatic effects of CO
2
, airborne
particulates, and SST emissions figured prominently in this discussion, and
the published SCEP included one of the first widely distributed images of
the Keeling Curve available to the public. But the SCEP also dealt with DDT
and other pesticides, mercury and other heavy metals, nuclear waste, more
“traditional” sources of air and water pollution like agriculture and industry,
and, finally, oil spills.
20
The SCEP report was in this sense a fairly compre-
hensive “state of the problem” assessment of the global environment— a sort
of tentative, environment-specific preview of
The Limits to Growth.
The SCEP authors were just as concerned with the effort to study the
global environment as they were with the environment itself, however.
The global environmental crisis, like the specific issue of CO
2
, was for the
SCEP authors first and foremost a scientific problem. In addition to outlin-
ing the global environmental crisis, SCEP offered a detailed assessment of
large-scale, systems-based environmental science.
21
Steeped in the belief
that better science would help make better policy, the SCEP group focused
their suggestions almost entirely on making more and better science. In
