Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
issues; but like McCloskey, the leaders of America's environmental organi-
zations selected their campaigns carefully. They looked for clear problems
with definitive solutions. What Charles David Keeling had noted about
the problems of understanding CO
2
as a pollutant in 1963 had not changed
by 1980. Climate change was highly technical, global in scale, and rife with
scientific uncertainties. It occurred over the course of decades and centu-
ries. No obvious political or legal structures existed to implement solu-
tions to the problems of climate— in fact, few if any solutions presented
themselves at all. Until the mid-1980s, climate change— by then primarily
a concern about global warming caused by rising CO
2
— remained almost
entirely within the purview of the scientific community.
Initially this community found remarkable success in using science
itself to gain influence within the top levels of government and resources
for further research. But success was fleeting. The early 1980s would reveal
the profound political liabilities of the science-first approach to advocacy
that characterized the politics of climate change.
the disciPlinary landscaPe of climate science
To understand how science dominated climate change discourse in the
1970s and early 1980s, it is helpful to briefly explore the landscape of cli-
mate science itself as it developed during the period. In the early 1970s,
making meaning out of the Keeling Curve was still a dynamic and con-
troversial process within the scientific community. The causes, extent,
and even direction of climate change— colder or warmer— were hardly
certain. Scientists from different disciplines approached the study of cli-
mate with different and sometimes competing methodologies, and they
often disagreed over what exactly they should study, how they should go
about studying it, and what their resulting findings told them. With limited
funding available for climate research, disciplinary and methodological
divisions defined the climate science community of the early 1970s as much
as did shared concerns over climate change and the human environment.
Perhaps the most well-known climatic controversy of the 1970s was the
dustup over “global cooling”— a sideshow in the broader history of global
warming but worth investigating for what it reveals about the develop-
ment of climate science. Much has been made of reports from the first
half of that decade that the most dangerous form of anthropogenic climate
