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Stockholm. Despite some nations' concerns over sovereignty and secu-
rity, Earthwatch reinforced scientists' efforts to monitor and study the
environment at a global scale, especially within the World Meteorological
Organization. UNEP promised to help focus the process of international
environmental policymaking such that policymakers might better access
scientific information, and media coverage of the conference helped stir up
public interest in international environmental issues involving the oceans
and the atmosphere. It was hardly the New Atlantis that some had quietly
dreamed of during the SCEP and SMIC meetings, but it was a start.
These stirrings of scientific success proved limited, however. As the
1970s wore on, atmospheric scientists found that the political framework
for global environmental governance established at Stockholm, dominated
as it was by national and regional interests, made it difficult to gain support
within the United Nations for the truly global environmental problems
involving the atmosphere— ozone depletion, aerosols, and CO 2 -induced
climate change.
At first, climate took a back seat to other issues because it was as yet a
novel problem that could barely even be described, let alone incorporated
into an international system of environmental protection. In 1972, there
were significant divisions within the scientific community over the true
causes, extent, and direction of climatic change. Robert White agreed
that the World Meteorological Organization should study the problem,
but despite the urgings of the SCEP, SMIC, and SCOPE reports, it was
not a primary focus of the international environmental community. To the
public, it was also profoundly unsexy. Scientists presented the world with
a complex, forward-thinking image of global atmospheric change in the
run-up to Stockholm. At Stockholm, Walter Sullivan wrote about people
using garbage bags to dress up buses like whales.
Soon, though, as the potential impacts of rising atmospheric CO 2
became clearer, it also became increasingly clear that the international
environmental community, for all its globalizing rhetoric, had no way of
dealing with a truly global environmental problem like climate change. In
Stockholm, scientists and political leaders framed everything from waste
management to soil depletion to land-use change to water pollution as
parts of a larger, global environmental crisis. But while these problems may
have crossed borders and represented a cumulative or aggregate threat to
the global environment, both their sources and impacts could be mapped
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