Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
experiment,” as Erik Conway calls it— for their rapidly developing models
of atmospheric radiation and circulation.
123
The ongoing controversy fos-
tered a new level of interinstitutional collaboration that contributed to the
development of the Community Climate Model (so named for its nearly
universal usage), and scientists' experiences working with the model gen-
erated new questions not just about global circulation, climate sensitivity,
and climate forcing but also about the impacts of these phenomena— an
area of research specifically targeted in the DOE cuts.
124
The new DOD
money thus helped climate scientists circumvent Reagan's funding cuts
and continue climate research— research that ultimately provided the raw
material for activist scientists' attacks on the very administration that had
cut the DOE research budget in the first place. Nuclear winter research was
in this sense not just a form of dissent but also a subtle form of retaliation.
scientists, environmentalists, democrats
Alongside the ongoing debate over the effects of CO
2
on climate, the
nuclear winter saga at once reflected and helped shape a new, more combat-
ive landscape of climate change politics. During the 1980s, scientists began
to tell the story of global warming in new contexts that gave CO
2
new
political meanings for new groups of people. Scientists themselves con-
tinued to focus primarily on producing more and better scientific knowl-
edge and on advocating for science policy and funding that would make
their research possible. But in the 1980s, their science advocacy led them
to engage in political conversations about the Reagan administration's
policies on energy, environmental protection, and nuclear defense that
attracted environmentalists and congressional Democrats also opposed
to administration policies. Global warming advocacy continued to revolve
around scientific debates and to unfold in the language of science; but
when scientists joined with environmentalists and Democrats on issues
involving energy and defense, they raised the political stakes. As a result,
the science itself became more polarized and more directly political.
Reagan's aggressive conservatism—the Reagan reaction—galvanized
disparate groups of scientists, environmentalists, and politicians into a
single community of global warming advocates, and in doing so it also
brought together three key themes in the history of global warming in a
new way. First, there was the challenge of making a problem as nebulous
