Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the framework for national-level coordination of climatic research, moni-
toring, and warning systems.
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In 1976, Brown and fellow House Democrat
Philip Hayes introduced the National Climate Program Act with biparti-
san support. The act's promoters accepted that “longer term changes in
climate, whether occurring naturally or resulting from human activities, or
both, may be leading to new global climate regimes with widespread effects
on food production, energy consumption, and water resources.”
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They
recommended that the president appoint an agency— be it NOAA, the
NSF, NASA, or whomever— to oversee government-sponsored research
pertaining to climatic change and the problems it might induce.
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Much of the congressional interest in the National Climate Program
Act came, not from believers of the “prophets of doom,” but from represen-
tatives of largely rural states who wanted scientific agencies to meet their
constituents' practical everyday needs. Members of Congress like Brown
and Republican senator Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico expressed grave
concerns over deforestation, desertification, ice cap depletion, and other
large-scale environmental problems associated with climatic change, but
most politicians focused on the more mundane aspects of climate that
affected their states' farmers and ranchers. They wanted to know about
extremes of heat and cold, about storms and severe weather events, and,
more than anything else, about water. Climate scientists and congressional
leaders alike saw an immediate need for creating and distributing climatic
data to “users” in short- and medium-term agricultural and hydrological
planning. As Ed Epstein of NOAA's Environmental Monitoring and Pre-
diction Unit— and later head of the National Climate Office under the
National Climate Program Act— noted, there was certainly a demand.
Requests for climatic data from the extant National Climate Center had
climbed from 2,500 per month in 1972 to 5,700 per month during the first
quarter of 1977 alone.
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In the late 1970s, the AAAS decided to make climate change the focus
of a long-term international initiative in resource management and envi-
ronmental protection. The largest general scientific society in the world
and the publisher of the journal
Science,
the AAAS was a member-driven
advocacy organization committed to advancing science in the public inter-
est. Unlike the National Academy of Sciences, which responded mostly
to the scientific needs of Congress and other parts of the federal govern-
ment, the AAAS tried to reflect the scientific interests of a larger American
