Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
relationship between climate scientists and environmentalists that would
change only slightly until the 1980s. Atmospheric scientists shared with
their counterparts at environmental organizations a common precaution-
ary ethos, but scientists made atypical environmentalists at best. Their
particular forms of advocacy reflected their professional values. As sci-
entific professionals, atmospheric scientists were meant to value the
community-defined ideals of “good science” over their personal political
commitments, and they shared a faith in— and dependence on— the tech-
nological advances of the aerospace era, which contrasted with many envi-
ronmentalists' distrust of large-scale high-tech development. Nevertheless,
atmospheric scientists took the lead in promoting atmospheric change as
a major environmental issue in the 1970s. In particular, they focused on
influencing the agenda of international scientific and environmental orga-
nizations leading up to the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment
in 1972, where scientists would push for a new interpretation of CO
2
and
atmospheric change in a new international context.
In part, differences in atmospheric scientists' and professional environ-
mentalists' forms of advocacy reflected differences between the two groups'
institutions. Environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and the Wil-
derness Society operated with a central political mission, supported by
members and donors, to advocate for conservation and the protection of
nature, wilderness, and the broader environment. They were largely demo-
cratic, and they often engaged in collective political campaigns on common
issues. They were— and still are— advocacy groups. Scientists, by contrast,
worked in competitive— and sometimes competing— institutions, with the
primary and overriding objective of producing more and better knowledge.
Hierarchies within institutions like NCAR, NASA, and NOAA were
chiefly based on merit and seniority, and these institutions answered to
bureaucratic agencies. To the extent that the larger atmospheric community
had a central collective political motivation, it was the promotion of science
itself. Atmospheric scientists framed their research in terms of its potential
social applications— applications that included environmental assessments
and resource management. When it came to policy, however, the scientific
community's first priority was to support programs that allocated more
money for scientific research. This, after all, was part of their job.
Markedly absent from atmospheric scientists' appeals for more money
and better cooperation was a concerted effort to involve the American
