Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
their image of the global environment around the issue of climate change
for several reasons. Most obviously, many of the prominent individuals
who participated in the studies were themselves atmospheric scientists or
climatologists, and both the practical problems and professional ambitions
of their disciplines guided their studies. Stephen Schneider, the so-called
rapateur in charge of scholarly communication for the conference that pro-
duced SMIC, recalled that promoting international efforts to study the
global atmosphere served atmospheric scientists' professional self-interest.
“Atmospheric scientists had a common cause in all countries,” Schneider
remembered. “We needed expensive satellites, balloons, ships, and com-
puters from our governments to do our work. International cooperation
in data sharing reduced costs of these tools to individual nations.”
25
When
atmospheric scientists described the global environment in the early 1970s,
it was no coincidence that their global vision matched their global research
interests.
The SCEP and SMIC scientists' focus on climate went beyond pro-
fessional self-interest, however. Just as importantly, climate served as an
intellectual anchor for the holistic, global-scale approach to environmental
research increasingly advocated not only by atmospheric scientists, but
also by biologists, oceanographers, and management professionals. Bent
on providing input into the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment,
SCEP sought out “environmental problems whose cumulative effects on
ecological systems are so large and prevalent that they have worldwide
significance.”26
26
As SCEP pointed out, pesticide use, agricultural waste,
and population growth were prevalent issues in states, nations, and regions
throughout the world. These problems were endemic, and thus in the
aggregate they were “global” problems. Still, these issues all had immedi-
ate causes and direct impacts, and they were typically rooted in discrete
and independent geographical spaces.
The very concept of climate, by contrast— again, derived from the
Greek
klima,
or inclination, as in the inclination of the sun vis-à-vis points
on the earth— implied a supraregional causal force beyond individual
humans' immediate perceptions. Climate change was not only a com-
mon problem; it was a problem determined by the chemical composition
of common space: the atmosphere. CO
2
and other chemical constituents
circulated almost limitlessly in this ubiquitous mixture. As scientists like
Stephen Schneider and others had by then begun to show, the potential
