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Book Review
| The Discovery of Global Warming. By Spencer R. Weart. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 240 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95.
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| As a scientific problem, global warming has a history dating back at least to Fourier in 1827. Its origins as a political issue are much more recent, with serious discussions of limiting greenhouse gas emissions beginning among scientists and economists only in the middle of the 1970s when the prospect of warming vied on an equal footing with the possibility of future cooling of the planet. Policy makers came to the table a decade later. |
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The evolution of the climate question from science to politics and back and forth has been the subject of surprisingly few in-depth treatments. This void leads to a damaging lack of perspective in the public debate. Without the context of history, assertions like "not long ago, the same scientists who now warn us of warming were alarmists over global cooling" or "global warming is a left wing plot hatched by anti-capitalist environmentalists" too often go unchallenged. |
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Spencer Weart's The Discovery of Global Warming goes a long way toward rectifying this situation. Weart, director of the Center for the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, is most effective at laying out the early scientific developments, and discussing how scientists moved the issue onto governmental research agendas. He is somewhat less effective in describing political developments once the issue veered squarely into the policy arena. |
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Weart highlights the importance of the actions of networks of scientists in constructing a bridge from science to policy on an arcane issue of no apparent urgency to the general public. He correctly points to the key leadership role of Swedish climatologist Bert Bolin in shepherding his colleagues toward consensus, beginning in the late 1960s. Weart's exploration of the science-policy interaction in the 1970s, which focused largely on increasing support for research, is thorough. His discussion of scientists' activity after the mid-1980s, which helped build the road to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, is more superficial. |
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One of the most useful features of this book is the timeline of events following the last chapter. Oddly, it ends at 1988 because "the period since 1988 is too recent to identify historical milestones." Perhaps this is a valid assertion from a historian's professional viewpoint. But the importance of some events, like the signing of the Framework Convention in 1992, is likely to endure. In contrast, the author is quite willing to highlight scientific questions, like the potential importance of warming-induced shifts in the major ocean circulation, whose significance also may not become clear for decades. |
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But never mind these shortcomings. The clear value of this book to scholars, reporters, and the interested public will hopefully spawn additional efforts that will fill these gaps, and lead to a greater understanding of scientists as political actors. The Discovery of Global Warming has done us all a great favor by pointing the way. |
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Reviewed by Michael Oppenheimer, Milbank Professor, Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Geosciences, Princeton University. |
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