Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
AAAS climate committee noted that preventing climatic change or miti-
gating its impacts might include potentially disruptive restrictions on
behavior and would require heavy capital investment. Committee mem-
bers saw a need for “an unusually high degree of unanimity and clarity
on the part of the scientific community to obtain from political leaders
the decisions and actions required.” And that unanimity needed to come
not only from the atmospheric and geophysical scientists studying the
climate but from the social and biological scientists addressing the pos-
sible “higher-order effects” of climatic variability on biological, social, and
economic systems. The scientific community, argued Tom Moss, should
strive for international cooperation in order to create a global scientific
consensus on climatic change, because “unless there is a world science
policy base for that kind of change, nothing is going to happen.”
66
Moss and others on the AAAS climate committee believed that a
strong scientific consensus, broadly publicized, would lead to positive
political action on climate change. This belief had driven climate research
since Roger Revelle began lobbying Congress for research funding in the
1950s, and it would shape scientists' advocacy on climate change into the
twenty-first century. “Political problems,” as Moss put it, “will be moved
by the 'forcing function' of knowledge. A worldwide
scientific
consensus of
the possible impact of climatic trends will be the forcing function for the
difficult
political
decisions, such as regulating land use.”
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Through the “forcing function of knowledge,” scientific consensus,
presented in the appropriate governmental and institutional channels,
would become political consensus. By helping foster better international
cooperation and coordination of climate science, then, the AAAS would
also eventually help make better climate policy.
the vieW from 1979
The AAAS advisory group was sanguine about the efficacy of scientific
consensus in part because they saw such agreement about the basic cli-
matic effects of CO
2
already forming within the American climate science
community. Reports of the NAS Climate Research Board (CRB) linked
CO
2
to warming throughout the mid-1970s, and by 1976 only a few scien-
tists still held to the idea of global cooling. As one member of the CRB put
it in 1979, “A plethora of studies from diverse sources indicates a consensus
