Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming

3. Making the Global Environment

67 3 Making the Global Environment Two images of the Keeling Curve provide a visual understanding of how putting the curve into a new context can change the meaning of atmospheric CO2 . One image is from the 1971 Study of Man’s Impact on Climate and the other was published in the best-selling mainstay of 1970s environmentalism, The Limits to Growth. The SMIC image treats the Keeling Curve in isolation. By now, you know that behind this simple curve lie several stories—​ stories about entrepreneurial scientists taking advantage of the Cold War research system, stories about institutions that reflect Cold War optimism and anxieties, and stories about “good science” and the particular forms of environmental advocacy it permitted within the climate science community in the 1960s. The gaps in the curve—​ the first just as Keeling began measurements on Mauna Loa in 1957–​ 58, the second when he lost funding in the spring of 1964—​ link the stories behind the curve with the curve itself. Each of these stories in one way or another involves a reinterpretation of the rise in atmospheric CO2 and what it means. But the SMIC image on its own makes no claims about these stories. Insofar as this is possible, the study provides the basic scientific information necessary to let the curve speak for itself. The Limits to Growth, by contrast, self-consciously tells a specific story about the Keeling Curve. The book’s image places the curve in an alarming new context, projecting the observed data from Mauna Loa forward and 68 | Chapter 3 backward in time to demonstrate an exponential increase in atmospheric CO2 that reinforces the dire environmental predictions of the larger work. The Limits to Growth gives CO2 all of one paragraph in its more than two hundred pages, but when it does it frames rising atmospheric CO2 as part of a crisis of industrial capitalism, wherein human activities threaten to outstrip the resource capacity of the earth. Ultimately, though they differed in approach, both studies were parts of a larger effort to reframe CO2 in light of a threatened global environment —​ to reinterpret CO2 in terms of a global scientific infrastructure and an emerging international political framework built to deal with new global problems. The making of this global environment was a complicated process, however. This chapter is about where the study of CO2 fits into the story of its making. The seminal event in the making of the global environment as we know it today was the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, Sweden. For scientists, environmentalists, and some U.N. leaders, the Stockholm Conference represented the center of an effort to promote and codify a broader science-based understanding of humanity’s global, collective relationship with nature. The “global environment” that scientists and diplomats envisioned addressed the phenomena of the natural world in terms of specific scientific methodologies and political ideals. Many scientists—​ particularly atmospheric scientists—​ focused on building more robust and cooperative global networks for scientific research. But scientists’ interest in the interdependence of the earth’s large-scale systems also implicitly—​ and sometimes explicitly—​ meant supporting continuing efforts within the United Nations to foster global political cooperation on environmental and nonenvironmental issues alike. Here was a new form of science-first advocacy, rephrased in explicitly environmental terms and retooled to fit within a specific vision of the global political arena. The U.N. Conference on the Human Environment was more than just a scientific affair, however; it was also geopolitical event held at a particular moment in Cold War history that reflected the historically and geographically specific environmental, economic, and political concerns of nations and people from around the world. International preparations for the conference made it clear that the politics of the world’s threatened global spaces would reflect the concerns of constituencies tied to local, regional, Making the Global Environment | 69 and national geographies rather than the utopian ideals of scientists and well-meaning U.N. bureaucrats. The difficulties that scientists faced in introducing CO2 into the framework of international environmental governance developed at Stockholm reflected the familiar intractability of the problem itself, and the conference revealed the limits of the science-first advocacy that scientists had developed to address CO2 and climate change domestically. These difficulties also reflected the complexities of a changing geopolitical context, a new iteration of the Cold War’s influence on...