Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
from a wide variety of scientific and environmental groups, including the
NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Sierra Club. Many of
these supporters were the same scientists and environmentalists who had
testified in Gore's global warming hearings in 1981, and they would return
to global warming in the future. In 1982, however, led by Sagan, the steer-
ing committee made the TTAPS nuclear winter paper, then still in prog-
ress, the centerpiece of its efforts.94
94
Sagan's group began by working within the scientific community to
establish widespread agreement on the basic phenomenon of nuclear win-
ter. In April of 1983, with the draft of the TTAPS paper all but complete,
Sagan invited one hundred prominent scientists from a variety of fields
to assess the TTAPS model and its conclusions in a private workshop in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
95
Sagan's nuclear winter meeting had three purposes. First, Sagan legiti-
mately hoped to flesh out any fatal flaws in the theory or the data that
might undermine the nuclear winter hypothesis before he introduced
the controversial idea to a broader public. Second, by asking other scien-
tists to comment on the work and incorporating their suggestions, Sagan
hoped to win the backing of prominent scientists in case critics tried to
undermine his policy position by challenging his science. Finally, the Cam-
bridge workshop served as a challenge to other groups working on the
scientific problem of nuclear winter— in particular, Stephen Schneider,
Starley Thompson, and Curt Covey at NCAR and a group led by Mike
MacCracken and Cecil “Chuck” Leith at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory— to move forward with their own research, which Sagan and
his colleagues believed would strengthen the TTAPS case.
96
Despite dis-
crepancies between model results and uncertainty among workshop par-
ticipants about the basic assumptions of both nuclear defense strategy and
atmospheric processes, Sagan saw this private review and the research that
came out of it as a vote of confidence for the TTAPS hypothesis— and for
the subsequent public conference.
With atmospheric scientists presumably on board after Cambridge,
Sagan and his colleagues orchestrated the “Conference on the Long-Term
Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War,” held in Washing-
ton, D.C., to garner as much public and political attention as possible.
97
The steering committee scheduled the two-day event to begin on Hallow-
een. On October 30, 1983, Sagan published an exposé on nuclear winter
