The Discovery of Global Warming (review)

Historian of physics Spencer Weart is deeply worried that the U.S. public does not understand enough of recent climate science to realize that global warming "is very likely," much less that it will likely cause "harm, widespread and grave" (p. 199). So he set out to write a short, accessible history aimed at making sense of the "irreducibly complicated" science of global climate change. To a great extent, he achieved these admirable goals. Therefore, historians of science and technology should be all the more concerned about some dubious conclusions that the general public is likely to infer from Weart's readable text.

Readers will learn valuable things about climate science. They will learn that "a number of scientific communities" working in parallel discovered global warming. This discovery, moreover, was "patently a social product, a consensus of judgments . . . among thousands of experts" (p. 196). Most important, they will learn that this discovery represented a fundamental shift in scientists' view of Earth: from stable, balanced, and benevolent to unstable, chaotic, and even dangerous.

Weart asserts that "technologies can change everything, even the air itself" (p. 197). He notes several instances in which new scientific techniques—to track carbon and oxygen isotopes, for example—produced data critical to the discovery of climate change. Most readers of this journal, however, will be disappointed that he provides few technical details on their development and use, and almost nothing on the broader historical relations between technology and culture. Readers might like to know, for example, that the all-important techniques for obtaining long cores of submarine sediments and continental ice were derived from drilling technologies used for oil and gas exploration.

Ultimately, Weart believes that scientific discovery results from a "vigorous struggle of ideas" (p. 198). Basing their judgment on his use of sources, readers will probably infer that this struggle takes place primarily in the pages of scientific journals and conference volumes. Weart's narrative is based almost entirely on a thousand "key articles" in climate science, and only an occasional oral history. Visitors to the book's companion website, http://www.aip.org/history/climate, which provides a full bibliography of these texts, will discover that Weart subscribes to a version of Richard Dawkins's neo-Darwinian "meme" theory, and that the crucial selection of scientific ideas happens within scientists' "research plans." This suggests the importance of scientific "gray literature" to the process of discovery, a source Weart does not examine.

Readers will also learn that global warming was discovered very recently and that "poor communication between fields [has] always impeded climate studies" (p. 125). More than half the book is devoted to the years since 1972, and Weart cares little for the period before the late 1950s: "There had never been a community of scientists studying climate change. Studies were pursued only by individuals. . . . Even within each field, specialization often separated people who might have had something to teach one another" (p. 33). This assertion is patently false and, like much of the book, ahistorical. Weart ignores the existence of a vast interdisciplinary network of physicians, agronomists, ecologists—and not a few meteorologists—interested in climate change on interannual and interdecadal scales. It would be interesting to know how geophysicists appropriated the science of climate change from this group.

On page 31, Weart declares that "geophysics is inescapably international," but he does not portray it as such, and a more accurate title for his book would be "The Discovery of Global Warming by America." Weart does mention important European-based actors (Arrhenius, Milankovitch, Dansgaard, Budyko, Möller, Bolin) and international organizations (International Geophysical Year, the Global Atmospheric Research Program, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), but almost always as a foil to actions in the United States. To paraphrase the title of an important 1974 BBC film that raised the threat of sudden global cooling (one of the few non-U.S. cultural references mentioned by Weart), uninformed readers may come to believe that the...