The Cold War Roots of Global Warming - Behind the Curve - page 27

the International Geophysical Year. 100 With the International Council
of Scientific Unions and the World Meteorological Organization (both
connected to the United Nations), Charney began work on the Global
Atmospheric Research Programme (GARP), a comprehensive system of
monitoring and data sharing endorsed by President Kennedy that finally
went live at the end of the decade. 101 Scientists continued to emphasize the
uncertainties and outstanding questions of their research, but they saw
answers on the horizon.
What they did not see, however, was that for the next half century each
round of scientific answers would yield increasingly complex scientific and
political questions— questions that would force them to rethink the mean-
ings of CO 2 in increasingly complicated contexts. In 1963, some of these
new questions were already stirring.
To begin with, atmospheric scientists' optimism about the future of
their profession masked an undercurrent of anxiety about the Cold War
research system that made their success possible. Like many of their col-
leagues in other disciplines, they worried about the centralization and
militarization of scientific research in the service of the state. 102 The
character and administration of their institutions— particularly NCAR,
but also later GARP and, to an extent, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics
Laboratory— reflected their efforts to insulate themselves from the very
government agencies that provided financial support for their research.
As a result, atmospheric science became a particular form of “big science,”
unique not only in its global reach but also in its flattened management
hierarchies and user-driven research agenda.
Heightened concerns over the accumulation of atmospheric CO 2 in
the early 1960s also reflected atmospheric scientists' growing ambivalence
about the social and environmental impacts of science itself. Philosophi-
cally, scientists like Roger Revelle and Charles David Keeling shared a
general interest in the unintended consequences of human actions with
America's bourgeoning environmental movement, and the two communi-
ties' concerns had common Cold War roots. In the early 1960s, atmospheric
scientists even began to frame CO 2 in terms of the dominant paradigm
in contemporary environmental politics: the paradigm of pollution. But
atmospheric CO 2 was an unconventional pollutant, and the scientists who
studied it maintained a faith in their discipline's ability to study, under-
stand, and ultimately solve environmental problems that many of their