Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
also tended loosely to follow institutional lines. University climatologists
like Bryson, H. H. Lamb, Thomas Murray, and Robert Matthews pro-
moted further research (i.e., greater funding) for historical and statistical
climatological studies in order to compete with atmospheric modelers at
well-funded government and quasi-governmental institutions like NCAR,
NOAA's GFDL, and NASA's GISS.
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These disciplinary and institutional
categories were relatively flexible, however, and they represented only one
aspect of the internal divisions of the climate science community.
the continuing Battle for “good science”
In the 1970s, the primary locus of climate change politics was climate
science; and in the politics of climate science, it was not the direction of
change that mattered most but its severity. Both the warming and cool-
ing scenarios threatened the stability of environmental, agricultural, and
economic systems by increasing “climatic variability,” or the year-to-year
fluctuations of local and regional weather patterns.
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To return briefly to
Thomas Friedman's appealing term, the issue was not warming or cooling
but “weirding.” Outspoken scientists like Bryson and Schneider empha-
sized the need to incorporate the risks of climatic instability into national
and international government infrastructures, regardless of the direction
of change. More conservative scientists, in contrast— some conservative
politically, some only professionally— were wary of the crisis mentality
that pervaded popular scientific literature in the 1970s and of the unspeci-
fied government action it implicitly supported.
Nature
editor John Maddox,
for example, lamented “the Doomsday Syndrome” among environmen-
tal scientists more generally. He equated works like Barry Commoner's
The Closing Circle
and Paul Ehrlich's
The Population Bomb
with sidewalk
“sandwich boards proclaiming 'The End of the World is at Hand.'”
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With
the supersonic transport debate and the controversial
Limits to Growth
study fresh in their minds, Maddox and others feared that overzealous
and premature policy recommendations, absent a more definitive scientific
consensus, might undermine climate scientists' authority as experts and
undercut government support for their projects. The scientific disagree-
ment about climate change, like the SST controversy, soon also became a
debate about “good science” and its relationship to policy.
Nothing underscored the climate science community's ambivalence
