The Discovery of Global Warming
The money that paid for research on climate change came mostly from governments. Governments were also central to any practical actions that might address global warming. Following the Second World War, the United States Federal government funded many kinds of research, much of it connected to Cold War concerns, and some of this happened to relate to climate change. During the 1960s, the government created major agencies for space, atmospheric, and ocean science, and in the 1970s, as public concern for the environment mounted, the agencies increasingly supported research targeted directly at climate change. But climate scientists were too few and disorganized to push through a unified national research program. Their budgets, divided among different agencies, would rise for a few years and then stagnate. During the 1980s, the funding and the science itself came under attack. The technical question of whether climate change might be a threat got caught up in political battles between pro-regulation environmentalists and anti-government conservatives. Demands for policies to mitigate global warming found little support among American politicians, who thought the ideas were politically unfeasible if not downright pernicious. (This essay covers only the United States government — the most important by far, in terms of influence and domestic greenhouse gas production. The views from London, Tokyo, Moscow, etc. taken together were equally important, and I apologize that I haven't written an essay on this. For international developments, see the essay on International Cooperation ).