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atmospheric scientists committed to informing good public policy by
presenting more and better knowledge, the politics of science funding
provided the best— really the only— way to legitimately protect the global
atmosphere from degradation. Rarely did scientists pitch their concerns
about the atmosphere directly to the public, as environmentalists might,
even when their drive for research funding overlapped with genuine envi-
ronmental concern (as it often did). Environmental advocates appealed to
middle-class Americans for support in protecting the nation's wilderness
areas and natural resources. Activist scientists appealed to an international
governmental elite for a change in high-level science policy in order to
monitor and better understand the global problem. If atmospheric sci-
ence achieved a higher priority in an international scientific agenda, they
believed, then the national and international bureaucrats responsible for
setting environmental policy would receive better information and there-
fore make better decisions. The SMIC report's image of the earth and the
Sanskrit prayer on its frontispiece may have conjured a popular ethos of
environmental protection, but nowhere in either SCEP or SMIC did the
authors attempt to mobilize the public at large. For atmospheric scientists,
the best environmental advocacy was science advocacy.
an atyPical environmentalism
There is little evidence that concerns for the atmosphere played more than
a marginal role in Congress's decision to deny funding for the supersonic
transport in 1971, but the debate over the ill-fated program introduced large-
scale atmospheric change as a mainstream environmental issue for the first
time. It also gave atmospheric scientists a greater role in American environ-
mental politics. The global scale of the atmosphere and the complexity of
its impacts on natural and human systems distinguished atmospheric and
climatic change from other environmental issues. Only atmospheric scien-
tists had the high-tech tools and disciplinary expertise to recognize threats
to the earth's atmosphere; and as informational gatekeepers during the SST
controversy and afterward, they were forced to act as the primary advocates
for this newly threatened environment. Many scientists did not relish this
position, but it was one that the climate science community would find
itself in repeatedly throughout the history of global warming.
The debate over the atmospheric impacts of the SST established a
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