Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
attempt to create a scientific consensus on climate change upon which to
base international policy. The IPCC itself was also the product of a related
set of iterative stories. Scientists and their associates in the United Nations
modeled the IPCC on the remarkably successful efforts to tackle two other
problems of the global atmosphere in the 1980s: acid rain and ozone deple-
tion. The relationship among acid rain, ozone, and CO
2
was deeply prob-
lematic, however, and understanding how the effort to combat these two
other environmental problems reinforced the primacy of science in global
warming discourse is central to the larger tragedy of global warming.
the vienna-montreal Process
For environmentalists, acid rain presented a much more familiar set of
problems than did either ozone depletion or global warming. Though
newly pressing at a global scale, it was not a new issue. In an 1872 book
called
Air and Rain: The Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology,
the English
chemist Angus Smith described the influence of airborne matter from
coal combustion and the decomposition of organic matter as “acid rain,”
noting its effect on the chemistry of rainwater throughout the English,
Scottish, and German countrysides.
1
In the 1950s, limnologists, agricul-
tural scientists, and atmospheric chemists took up the issue as part of
independent efforts to expand basic research within each discipline. By
the late 1960s, the Swede Svante Oden had begun to incorporate these
studies in a developing hypothesis that linked the causes of acid rain—
industrial emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO
2
), nitrogen oxides (NO
x
, often
pronounced “nox”), and other chemicals— with the phenomenon's envi-
ronmental and public health impacts.
2
Oden demonstrated that European
SO
2
emissions adversely affected Scandinavian plant growth, freshwater
fish populations, and overall water quality. His work was part of what
prompted Sweden's leadership in the U.N. Conference on the Human
Environment in 1972.
3
Oden's studies of acid rain helped to illuminate the potential geo-
graphical disparity between the sources and impacts of pollutants like
SO
2
and NO
x
. As with global warming, the issue required new thinking
about transboundary environmental governance, both in Europe and in
North America. As early as 1970, the Nixon administration considered
levying a tax on SO
2
tied to energy production from coal.
4
Agreements
