Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
by about 12 percent, leading to a potential 24 percent increase in cases of
skin cancer in the United States, representing about 120,000 new cases
per year, or 2.4 million cases over the twenty-year lifetime of one of the
planes. For the Concorde, which flies lower than the Boeing 2707 would
have, the numbers were significantly lower, but the nature of the projected
impacts were similar. The SST's complex effects not just on ozone but on
CO
2
, water vapor, and climate still concerned some scientists as well. Amid
controversy over the certainty of their results, CIAP's participants recom-
mended further limitations on the Concorde's U.S. flights, based in large
part on their effects on the atmospheric environment.
the atmosPhere as an environmental issue
Research into the impact of the SST launched scientific and political con-
versations about a new type of “environmental” problem for the 1970s: the
degradation of the earth's atmosphere. Both the
New York Times
and the
LA Times
reported on this new kind of pollution. They may have misrepre-
sented the substance of William Kellogg's findings, but their characteriza-
tion of climatic change and ozone depletion as new environmental issues
accurately reflected the commonalities between scientists' and environ-
mentalists' concerns. Kellogg's “you better watch out” warning about the
unintended consequences of modifying global systems echoed environ-
mentalists' claims that threats to nature and nature's systems should play
a role in decisions about technological and economic development. The
SCEP report explicitly underscored this commonality, framing the focus
on global environmental problems as a complement to “local and regional
problems . . . that many organizations are deeply concerned with studying
and ameliorating.”
44
In this new context, the curious Keeling Curve no
longer described a “grand experiment” or a vaguely troubling trend. Like
atmospheric change more broadly, CO
2
became a serious environmental
concern.
As Keeling had noted in 1963, CO
2
in the atmosphere was a peculiar
type of concern. First, the scale of atmospheric change made it unique
among mainstream environmental issues of the 1960s and 1970s. Land-
use and waste-management problems typically forced environmentalists
to focus on specific partitions of terrestrial or aquatic space, as did efforts
to protect wilderness areas and species habitat. Water pollution, though
