Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
no means exclusively global. The short-term efforts to predict and control
weather and climate appealed primarily to politicians from the arid West
and hurricane-ridden Southeast who recognized the tangible benefits of
understanding meteorological events. Still, even domestic concerns about
weather and climate entwined with the scientific objectives of the Cold
War. Scientific leaders interested in the global phenomena of the atmo-
sphere used the potential regional impacts of these phenomena to gain
support from western and southeastern senators for their research. Sena-
tors from these regions in turn cited a patriotic concern for the national
security implications of weather and climate control— alongside the ben-
efits of local weather-modification projects— in order to win appropriations
for further research. Boosters of atmospheric science emphasized these
potential applications of basic research, especially when it came to the
nebulous issue of CO
2
accumulation. The combination of politicians'
interest in regionally specific weather-modification projects and the fed-
eral government's broader interest in the potential geopolitical impacts of
atmospheric change helped men like Revelle, Berkner, and Wexler estab-
lish atmospheric science in general— and research on CO
2
and climate in
particular— as a Cold War research priority for the 1960s.
At the outset of the decade, atmospheric scientists' vision for their
field was justifiably optimistic. Both their scientific and administrative
success, largely made possible by newly available government money, fed
this optimism. Relatively rapid and continuous improvements in weather
forecasting and global circulation models, along with better and more
complete theoretical descriptions of atmospheric motion, convinced many
atmospheric scientists— especially meteorologists and atmospheric model-
ers— that the primary obstacles to predicting and eventually controlling
the weather and climate were the availability of accurate global data and
computers' capacity to handle that data. New Cold War technologies—
especially the satellite and the increasingly powerful computers developed
in the late 1950s and early 1960s— promised to remove both of these poten-
tial roadblocks. Beginning with NCAR, leaders in atmospheric science
sought to create more permanent institutional arrangements for scientists
to access these new tools.
Led by Jule Charney, American atmospheric scientists in the early 1960s
also sought to expand the geographical reach of their research by insti-
tutionalizing the system of global atmospheric monitoring begun during
