Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
greater climate science community of taking too cavalier an approach to
the evidence.
119
Conservatives criticized liberals like Sagan and Schneider
for going public with their results before they had fully fleshed out the sci-
ence. As Edward Teller, a nuclear winter skeptic and a key booster of the
Strategic Defense Initiative, commented in
Nature,
“Highly speculative
theories of worldwide destruction— even of the end of life on Earth— used
as a call for a particular kind of political action serve neither the good
reputation of science nor dispassionate political thought.”
120
Though the hypothesis itself had little to do with CO
2
, the nuclear
winter debate brought together the increasingly intertwined science and
politics of climate change. From the beginning, liberal scientists, environ-
mentalists, and politicians gravitated toward nuclear winter because of its
political implications. Much as they had mobilized CO
2
research to under-
mine the Reagan administration's energy policy, these same groups— com-
posed largely of the same individuals— studied and publicized the climatic
impacts of a nuclear war as a form of public resistance to Reagan's defense
policy and to the administration more generally. Again, this dissent played
out in congressional hearings (again sponsored by Al Gore), at scientific
conferences and in scientific journals, and within the federal bureaucracy.
To a much greater extent than the CO
2
issue did in the early 1980s, the
nuclear winter debate also appeared in public media like newspapers,
television, and magazines. And finally, again, the experience drove liberal
climate scientists, Democratic politicians, and leaders of environmental
organizations to cooperate in response to a common opponent: the Rea-
gan administration. The organizers of the Halloween conference worked
in Washington, D.C., offices provided by Gus Speth and his new World
Resources Institute. The NRDC, meanwhile, worked to obtain documents
on the U.S. Navy and Defense Nuclear Agency responses to nuclear win-
ter— documents the organization distributed to both liberal scientists like
Schneider and to members of Congress.
121
Studying the climatic impacts of nuclear war provided climate scien-
tists with a more subtle way of resisting the administration's position on
CO
2
-induced climate change as well. The nuclear winter debate gave many
of the same scientists whose DOE funding had been cut under Reagan new
access to government money through the Department of Defense (DOD).
122
The DOD-sponsored research paid scientific dividends, especially for cli-
mate modelers who used nuclear winter as a test case— a “digital thought
