Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
general, they recommended a more extensive and cooperative international
environmental monitoring effort, better data collection, and the develop-
ment of rigorous, universal standards of observation and data analysis.
Each working group also offered recommendations specific to research in
their particular areas of expertise. For SCEP scientists, these programmatic
recommendations were meant to set the parameters for understanding the
global environment in the years to come.
SCEP's assessment of the state of global environmental science
paralleled an effort by the International Council of Scientific Unions
to incorporate similar recommendations into a scientific infrastructure
under the auspices of the United Nations. In 1971, the ICSU's Scientific
Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) presented a global
scientific research plan to the United Nations that would use the World
Meteorological Organization's Global Atmospheric Research Program
(GARP) to begin answering the scientific questions raised by the SCEP
report. SCOPE published the plan as
Global Environmental Monitoring,
a
preparatory document for the 1972 Stockholm Conference.
Climate change provided a centerpiece for both the SCEP and SCOPE
reports, and interest in problems of CO
2
and atmospheric change contin-
ued to increase in the run-up to Stockholm. The flourishing of systems
science acronyms did not end with SCOPE, and a number of other studies
honed in on climate as the “most relevant” issue in the project of global
environmental monitoring.
22
In 1971, the problem of climate engendered
its own international study, a climate-specific follow-up to SCEP called
the
Study of Man's Impact on Climate
— the study that produced the Keeling
Curve image. Sponsored by MIT and hosted by the Swedish Academy of
Sciences, the conference that produced the SMIC report endeavored to
forge a consensus on “what we [scientists] know and do not know” about
climate and “how to fill the gaps.”
23
The report, published in a rush in
1971, offered suggestions for improving climatic and atmospheric research
within the international scientific community, including the potential
costs of the recommended research programs. Targeted at providing “input
into planning for the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment,”
SMIC planted the climate and the atmosphere— or, more accurately, cli-
matic and atmospheric science— firmly at the center of its definition of the
global environment.
24
The scientists involved in the SCEP, SMIC, and SCOPE reports built
