Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
global warming and outlined areas of research that would generate the
information Congress needed to make effective policy.
39
In part, the pro-
ceedings reflected Gore's and Scheuer's genuine, continued concern over
an increasingly disconcerting environmental issue— an issue that Gore
would make a centerpiece of his long political career.
40
But the congressmen also mobilized these scientists to demonstrate the
Reagan administration's myopia and even negligence in cutting govern-
ment funding for CO
2
research at the DOE. Reagan's aides had kept the
details of their DOE budget reallocation quiet, but Gore and Scheuer—
along with the scientists they invited to testify— knew that administration
officials planned to cut CO
2
research along with the majority of DOE's
other environmental research programs. In the second half of the hearings,
Gore and Scheuer called on Reagan's new appointments in the DOE and
Office of Science and Technology Policy and challenged them to defend
their yet-to-be-released budget cuts, not only in the face of state-of-the-
art climate science, but quite literally in the face of the scientists who had
produced it.
41
The confrontation made the administration look bad.
The Democrats' public approach to CO
2
and climate yielded three
important results. First, Gore's 1981 hearings, along with subsequent hear-
ings in 1982 and 1984, helped establish both personal and ideological rela-
tionships between prominent climate scientists (many of them already
relatively liberal) and the mainstream political left.
42
Democrats had spon-
sored hearings on CO
2
and climate in the past; but unlike in the informa-
tional hearings of the 1970s, the confrontational nature of the hearings
of the early 1980s all but forced scientists to take sides. Reagan's appoin-
tees— in particular, N. Douglas Pewitt, assistant to Energy Secretary James
Edwards— alienated scientists like Revelle and Schneider by threatening to
cut their DOE funding. In the process of defending the cuts, these appoin-
tees directly challenged both the value and substance of scientists' work.
43
Gore, Brown, and Scheuer provided an attractive alternative. Most obvi-
ously, the Democrats called hearings to give scientists a voice in defending
funding for CO
2
research. They were natural allies. But Brown, Scheuer,
and even more notably Gore, a one-time student of Revelle's at Harvard,
also demonstrated a high level of scientific literacy and a genuine concern
about global warming that impressed the scientists on a personal level.
Gore's Academy Award- winning 2006 global warming exposé,
An Incon-
venient Truth,
bears testament to the depth and longevity of this concern.
