Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
impacts of climate change on the earth's natural and human systems were
similarly limitless. Tied to the global atmosphere— fluid, dynamic, and
borderless— climate change offered a prime example of an environmental
problem that could properly be addressed only at a global scale.
27
In the
early 1970s, the very peculiarities of climate change that had made CO
2
a
problematic pollutant for Charles David Keeling in 1963 suddenly seemed
like assets for framing CO
2
in a new global context.
the Politics of systems science
In the early 1970s, systems scientists sought to trace the Keeling Curve onto
a new background of globally focused systems science, but as they did so
they also traced CO
2
onto a new geopolitical background. The systems sci-
ence concepts at the heart of the SCEP, SMIC, and SCOPE reports served
a mixture of scientific and political ends. Through these studies, scientists
advanced a framework for studying the earth's threatened landscapes, nat-
ural resources, and species. By setting the research parameters for measur-
ing and monitoring the world's large-scale systems, they theoretically made
the global environment knowable. But each of these studies, written as
preparatory documents for the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Envi-
ronment, also engaged in an ongoing political discussion about how the
global environment— and by extension the world more broadly— ought
to be governed. Global environmental research and global environmental
governance were two sides of the same coin.
The political implications of systems science represented a new, envi-
ronmentally focused take on what nuclear biophysicist and
Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists
cofounder Eugene Rabinowitch had in 1946 dubbed “sci-
entific internationalism.”
28
With roots in early Cold War debates about
secrecy in nuclear energy research, scientific internationalism comprised
two complementary beliefs. The first was that science flourishes best in
open, democratic societies that foster the free flow of scientific informa-
tion across political and geographical boundaries. The second was that
cooperation among governments in scientific and technological ventures
would foster political cooperation, peace, and global prosperity.
As climate science historian Paul Edwards explains, atmospheric sci-
entists who relied on global networks of meteorological and climatic data
had a particular interest in international scientific cooperation. Without
