Air - Environmental Transformations - page 57

the atmospheric conditions of the day. As we see
from his reflections on 31 January 1925, as soon
as mist descended his observation become
compromised. Second, because Mr Bloor's version
of atmospheric science had to be carried out at
street level, his scientific objectivity became
compromised at a series of levels. At one level, Mr
Bloor could only observe a limited number of
chimneys at one time, so his scientific gaze was
obviously limited in its scope. His scientific gaze
was also dependent upon the local terrain, and
his ability to get a suitable vantage point from
which to view air pollution. At another level, there
are various accounts of smoke inspectors being
approached by factory owners as they carried out
their inspections, who would plead for leniency
against prosecution. These factors serve to remind
us that atmospheric science is rarely something
that can be confined to a laboratory. As a science
that must be practised in the midst of the
complexities of everyday life, the study of air
pollution must acknowledge the particular
conditions that surround the knowledge that it
produces.
In order to address the problems that faced
British smoke inspectors, the national government
and local authorities eventually promoted the use
of various instruments for measuring pollution.
While these gauges and filters could offer a more
reliable and continuous assessment of urban air
pollution, questions still remained about where
they should be located (Whitehead, 2009: 94-125).
Many air pollution instruments that were placed
in city-centre locations were subject to vandalism
(with some deposit gauges in Glasgow routinely
containing urine following busy Saturday nights in
the city). More recently, the 'urban bias' in the
location of air pollution monitoring stations has
become an issue within the broader politics of acid
rain. According to Hajer (1995: 128), the decision
to locate the majority of the UK's sulphur dioxide
monitoring stations in urban areas led to gaps in
scientific knowledge concerning the extent of acid
rain deposition in rural areas. More worryingly,
this lack of scientific knowledge appears to have led

to the false belief within the British government
that acid rain was not having a significant impact
on the ecologies of the countryside in the UK
(once rural sulphur dioxide deposition monitoring
did begin in rural areas, it was shown that levels
of acid rain deposition in northern Britain were
comparable with those in southern Sweden: a well
known acid rain hotspot) (Hajer, 1995: 128-129).
What these examples illustrate is that science must
always be located somewhere, and this location has
impacts on the types of scientific knowledge that
are produced (see Haraway, 1991).

3.3.3 Climate change denial: from
big tobacco to climategate

If the example of air pollution monitoring
illustrates the practical conditions that limit the
scope and validity of the scientific knowledge of the
atmosphere, recent trends in climate science
indicate how scientific knowledge can be more
deliberately manipulated (see Hulme, 2009). While
many scientists have raised important questions
about the scientific consensus on human-induced
climate change, others have sought to deliberately
generate a sense of public confusion on the issue.
In his book Heat: How to Stop the Planet
Burning , The Guardian journalist and prominent
environmental author George Monbiot outlines
what he terms the climate change 'denial industry'
(Monbiot, 2006). As a way of illustrating the nature
of this denial industry, Monbiot reflects upon a
statistic that was reported by the prominent British
botanist David Bellamy in a 2005 letter published
in the New Scientist magazine. Bellamy's letter
stated that the latest scientific research suggested
that counter to the claims of the climate change
consensus, 555 out of the world's 625 glaciers had
been growing since 1980 (Monbiot, 2006: 24).
When Monbiot asked where Bellamy had got this
data from he identified the source as an issue of the
journal 21st Century Science and Technology . It was
at this point that Monbiot become very suspicious
about the source of Bellamy's unlikely data.
Monbiot discovered that 21st Century Science and