The Politics of Dissent - Behind the Curve - page 131

of viewpoints on CO 2 , but Nierenberg controlled the overall presentation
and penned the summary himself. By framing the issue as a scientific prob-
lem of little immediate concern— and by undercutting the consensus of the
1979 Charney Report— Nierenberg gave the administration the best result
it could have hoped for. This was science-first climate change advocacy
turned on its head.
If the Nierenberg Report helped to strip the urgency from the CO 2 dis-
cussion, a competing report put out by Stephen Seidel and Dale Keyes of
the EPA, Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?, enabled the Reagan admin-
istration to further undercut the certainty of climate science in the public
eye. 74 Produced in a rush, the EPA report took the opposite approach to
that of the NAS study. Seidel and Keyes described CO 2 as an urgent prob-
lem that required a reevaluation of national energy policy. To the extent
that the impacts of CO 2 remained uncertain, they provided grounds for
precautionary action, not inaction.
Despite their conflicting conclusions, both reports actually confirmed
the inevitability of greenhouse warming, but George Keyworth and White
House counsel Ed Meese played up the disparities between Nierenberg's
“sober” NAS report and the “unnecessarily alarmist” EPA study, imbuing
press coverage of the climate issue with a sense of confusion rather than
one of concern. 75 The press, not surprisingly, took more interest in the
“debate” between the EPA and NAS scientists than in the broader implica-
tions of the science itself. Both studies were soon forgotten.
nuclear Winter
Reagan's energy policy figured prominently in reshaping the political land-
scape of global warming in the 1980s, but the new politics of global warm-
ing did not revolve entirely around fossil fuels. They also entwined with
less obvious political issues, the most important of which was national
defense. The link among CO 2 , defense policy, and disarmament became
enmeshed in the debate over “nuclear winter,” bringing the Cold War back
into the politics of global warming in a new way. 76
Coined by NASA's Richard Turco in 1983, the term nuclear winter
described a dramatic decrease in global mean temperatures that they
believed would accompany a major nuclear exchange. Nuclear winter had
very little to do with CO 2 and nothing to do with energy policy, but the