Workshop Report: “Climate & the Beginning of the Crisis Decades: Climate Research & Discourse During the 1970s,” Manchester, August 30, 2024
By Robert Naylor (University of Manchester and University of Cambridge), Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda (Technical University of Munich), and Ruth Morgan (Australian National University)
Due to the generous support of the International Commission for the History of Meteorology and the British Society for the History of Science, Manchester’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) was able to host a workshop exploring climate research and discourse during the crucial but often-neglected decade of the 1970s.
The 1970s have been argued to be a period of political, economic, scientific, and cultural transition. Daniel T. Rogers has described the 1970s as the beginning of an age of fracture, when the discursive, economic, and political landscape was torn apart and reformed. Eric Hobsbawm has written that the 1970s heralded “a world that lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis.” It is during this decade that climate change narratives began to emerge into the political spotlight. As shown by scholars such as Spencer Weart and Joshua Howe, reasons for this increase in status include the rising influence of the environmentalist movement, neo-Malthusian fears of population explosion supposedly accentuated by adverse climatic effects on crop yields, and (controversially) the usefulness of climate change arguments for the nuclear power lobby during a time of energy and oil crisis.
However, despite this important work, many climate histories overlook the 1970s, diminishing its importance, and often instead focus on the foundation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 and discount events that could not be construed as a direct precedent to the IPCC’s formation. This workshop helped rectify this by bringing together papers that highlight climate change ideas when they were at an amorphous, protean stage, when issues around climate change were being made to resonate with diverse economic and political interests of the time. By doing this, we aimed to better understand the diverse ways and contexts in which we have come to know, perceive, and politicise climate and its changes.
The workshop was organised in four parts: we had three panels: Framings, Institutions and Energy and a roundtable discussion to finish the day. The panels were grouped loosely around the content of the papers we received and spoke to important ways in which research around climate change in the 1970s was organised. The event was kicked off by Carsten Timmermann, the Director of CHSTM, who outlined the history of Manchester’s substantial contribution to the social studies of science. The workshop then proceeded with the first panel, Framings, which highlighted the different ways that 1970s climate and wider environmental discourse were placed into wider institutional, historiographical and cultural frameworks by diverse actors.
Framings
The first speaker was Erik Isberg of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, who discussed how palaeoclimatologists navigated crisis discourse of the 1970s, using the case study of the CLIMAP project which analysed deep sea cores. The discursive environment increased demands for short-term forecasting, leading to what Isberg described as a “temporal negotiation” as palaeoclimatologists attempted to reconcile such demands with their traditionally much more distant temporal horizon.
The next speaker was Eleanor Shaw of the University of Manchester, who presented on communications between British climatologist Hubert Lamb and the editors of Nature, The UNESCO Courier, and The Ecologist in 1973–74. Eleanor showed how climate change framings were negotiated between Lamb and journal editors, and how Lamb’s relatively conservative messaging was “massaged” to resonate with particular audiences and worldviews, particularly the fledgling environmentalist movement that framed climate change as a potential existential threat. An important aspect of this story, Eleanor argued, was a rapidly commercializing academic publishing industry, and the accompanying competition over readership.
Following Eleanor was Madison Renner of Harvard University, who argued that the a sense of embarrassment surrounding apocalyptic climate discourse in the 1970s contributed to a very cautious approach from US climate scientists in the early 1980s, as they attempted to legitimize their work in the context of substantial investments in climate research by the US Department of Energy. Madison’s contribution perhaps suggested why the 1970s have been overlooked in some canonical histories, as much of this canon reflects the historiographical biases of climate scientists themselves.
The panel was closed by Pollyanna Rhee of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who discussed the interest of fracking pioneer George Mitchell in sustainability, as expressed through his support of “The Woodlands” planned residential development. Pollyanna’s contribution underlined the fact that stereotypical dichotomies of radical climate activism and its conservative opponents cannot be applied to 1970s discourse, if indeed they can be applied today.
During the panel-wide discussion, Richard Staley said that he was struck in both Madison and Eleanor’s talks about how climate scientists were possibly treating the social world as if it were a phenomenon like climate, in that long term trends were the focus rather than sudden catastrophes, and how Lamb’s task of critically analysing and incorporating diverse weather and climate reports to understand “normal climate” may have contributed to his resistance against alarmist proposals in the 1970s. Eleanor agreed with Richard, highlighting how Hubert Lamb was clearly hesitant to make grand statements about climate impacts even against editorial pressure, leading editors to reach for other tools to help Lamb’s writing resonate with their worldviews. This, so Eleanor stated, could be contrasted with other climatologists of the era like Reid Bryson. Madison discussed how the US Department of Energy originally wanted to include many more social dimensions to its future scenarios, but that these aspects were cut in the early 1980s, possibly partly influenced by a redrawing of disciplinary boundaries in order to distance the DoE from 1970s predictions of ecological collapse. After a tasty lunch provided by the University of Manchester’s catering provider, the workshop moved on to the second panel, entitled Institutions, which considered the role of state, intergovernmental, and private organizations in shaping climate research and discourse.
Institutions
The first speaker was Frank Gerits of Utrecht University. Frank examined the complex relationship between international environmental and development discourse during the decade, focusing on the New International Economic Order, a set of proposals put forward by developing countries to create a more equitable international economic system. He argued that understanding the struggle over the environment between the Global North and South requires focusing more on changing ideas around economy and development, rather than the relationships between scientists and politicians.
Next, one of the workshop co-organizers, Robert Naylor, gave a talk on Rockefeller Foundation support for climate research during the 1970s. Robert argued that such support stemmed from frantic efforts to reform the Foundation’s image in response to adverse tax legislation in the late 1960s. As a result, he claimed that the Rockefeller Foundation’s commitments to climate change research were reactionary and unsystematic, even if they funded consequential research projects that pioneered interdisciplinary climate change studies.
The following speaker, Dania Achermann of the University of St. Gallen, discussed the fascinating path by which carbon dioxide studies became reframed as climate research through a changing institutional landscape, beginning her story at radiocarbon dating laboratory that was started at the University of Bern in 1956. Dania showed how the “disciplinary box” for such work as funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation shifted from “nuclear research” (1955), to “nuclear physics” (1957), to “physics” (1963), to “other fields” (1968) and “environmental sciences” (1972) before finally becoming “climatology” (1984).
The final speaker of the panel was Carolina Granado of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who asked how the rise of climate as a political problem influenced the assessments of climate impacts, using the case study of the 1979 World Climate Conference. Carolina argued that the World Climate Conference, through its influence on the World Climate Programme, had a major role in framing what became known as climate impact assessments in the 1980s.
The panel discussion was opened by panel chair Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda, who asked about the relations between climate and wider environmental discourses within each paper. Frank responded that climate was “one of many” environmental concerns in UN development discourse during the 1970s and was usually mentioned with regard to salient issues of the time like food production and the crisis in the Sahel. Frank was echoed by Robert and Carolina, with Robert emphasising the interdisciplinary nature of environmental research and Carolina discussing how climate change became more salient in the 1980s. Dania focused on how carbon dioxide research could be used as a political tool by the environmentalist movement in the 1970s, as it helped established a normal state of the planet from which deviations could be understood and emphasised. Robert then ruminated on why climate shifted from being “one of many” environmental issues to being a salient problem in its own right in the 1980s, asking why climate was, as he put it, “one of the winners.” Frank and Elliot agreed that it was an interesting question, with Frank discussing how two of the big environmental issues of the 1970s were noise pollution and urban sprawl, which have largely fallen from prominence despite their enduring impacts. The final panel, Energy, considered how climate and wider ecological issues interacted with developments within fossil fuel industries during the decade in question.
Energy
The panel was opened by Andrew Seaton of University College London. Using the case study of economist and pioneer of the “sustainability” concept E. F. Schumacher, who spent twenty years for the UK National Coal Board, Seaton argued that many environmentalist concepts were forged in close association with the fossil fuel institutions. For Schumacher, the NCB’s decentralised administration, public ownership, and techno-futurism provided a more stable route to energy security than importing foreign oil, providing an early formulation of “sustainability” before the carbon dioxide emission framing became more powerful.
Andrew was followed by Abosede Omowumi Babatunde of the University of Ilorin, who discussed the 1970s oil boom in Nigeria, highlighting the extractive relationship between the Nigerian government, oil multinationals, and the people of the Niger Delta. Bose demonstrated that the oil boom and the accompanying tax revenue influenced government laxity in enforcing local environmental regulation on the oil multinationals, thereby worsening ecological crises in the Niger Delta, a situation that has continuing echoes in the region today.
The final speaker of the workshop was Richard Staley of the Universities of Cambridge and Copenhagen, who framed the 1970s as a “hinge point” in ocean core paleoclimatology. Richard began his talk saying that in some respects the complexity of goings on with regard to climate in the 1970s was radically simplified in the 1990s, but that the 1970s also saw a simplification of work in the 1950s. He illustrated this with a story of paleoclimatology, beginning with a more geology-based vision of the subject as dominated by oil interests in the 50s, proceeding to a view of the subject as concerned with understanding the timings and causes of ice ages in the 70s, to finally paleoclimatology being a research area associated with global temperature in the 90s. Eleanor Shaw opened the final panel-wide discussion, asking Andrew whether Shumacher engaged with concerns over localised air pollution. Andrew replied the Schumacher saw such pollution as “waste” and was interested in innovations like smokeless coals, and therefore did not see such pollution as fatally undermining coal as an energy source. Katerina Zouboulakis asked about the images used in the panel’s presentations, leading to an extended discussion of graphs in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that ended up causing controversy, the provenance of which is often difficult to determine. The panel chair Robert Naylor asked whether all three papers could be seen as part of a wider trend of reductionism in the twentieth century, where information was condensed so much to be misleading, and economic processes and arguments were reduced to bottom lines so that wider social and ecological impacts were ignored, a process that Schumacher resisted in the NCB. Richard responded by saying that processes like this are always going on, sometimes for the very legitimate reason for “getting to the point,” and that an understanding of context was required to get the full picture. Andrew agreed that a lot of Schumacher’s work could be seen as a reaction against reductionism, with him pushing against an economistic point of view that energy was just another consumable good. Schumacher was also a critic of the centering of GDP growth in policy.
Roundtable
The workshop was brought to a close by a roundtable attended by speakers and attendees, where some wider themes and commonalities of the workshop were brought into discussion. Simone Turchetti praised the workshop papers as treating the history of climate studies “in its own terms” and reflecting how the actors of the 1970s understood the problems, rather than linear histories that reflect the current status of climate discourse. Robert Naylor agreed, praising the workshop for expanding beyond what can sometimes be a very whiggish historiography that focuses so much on antecedents to current climate discussion, and that the workshop highlighted the “rich tapestry” of thinking around climate during the 1970s.
Jon Agar stated that a couple of things were “missing” from the workshop, one of which was explicit mention of the term “crisis” in the sources presented, and asked whether this was because the crises of the 1970s had become so widely accepted that explicit mentions were no longer necessary, or whether “crisis” is perhaps an overused term that should not be applied to the decade in question. Eleanor Shaw responded to Jon by saying it would be useful to break down what is meant by “crisis” and that there are different categories. One of these categories was crisis as a discursive strategy, where actors were jumping aboard moments of crisis, which could happen without such actors making explicit reference to the term. Eleanor claimed that crisis as a discursive strategy could be very different to how crisis was experienced, and that it would be strange to expect direct experiences of the food crisis for example to show up in the work of extremely privileged scientists. Eleanor claimed that crisis as a discursive strategy, a lived experience, and a retrospectively applied term could be very different. Dania Achermann echoed this need for a more nuanced discussion, saying that although the 1970s was known for spending cuts, the particular field that she was examining and many others flourished during the decade in question, and there was not a crisis at least in terms of research funds. Madison Renner stated that she had seen the term “crisis” used extensively in her sources, especially sources from the late 1970s reflecting on the 70s as a whole, and emphasised that what could have been a crisis for society actually brought money into some, but not all, of the research fields that the workshop was examining, implying that the terminology of crisis could be dampened when examining certain archival material.
Carsten Timmermann stated that crisis is a turning point, and therefore it can be retrospectively diagnosed, leading Robert to ask whether one could ever know that they were living through a turning point. Reuben Martens expanded on this by suggesting that crisis might just be perpetual, and that history is just a description of going through continual crises. He stated that it was difficult to identify the crises that you were living through, but that there had to be crises in order for something to change.
Richard Staley said that the sources he examined suggested that actors were “managing” crises, and that discussion of “problems” might be in pursuit of “solutions.” Robert then brought in discussion of Hubert Lamb, who very much wanted his work to be useful, and suggested that crisis discourse amongst scientists might be another way of emphasising their relevance and that crisis creates the solutions. Erik Isberg added that he shared this image of crisis being an “operative framework,” using an example where palaeoclimatologists had discussed oil being the crisis of today, and food being the crisis of tomorrow. Carolina Granado added that her sources from 1979 portrayed crisis as something that should not be repeated in the future, with the World Food Crisis being highlighted especially as a past pitfall.
Andrew Seaton reminded the group that portraying the 1970s as a decade of crisis sometimes has very overt political dimensions. There is a depiction of the 1970s as a failure of the state, and this is especially pertinent as many of the potential solutions to climate issues are in fact state-led.
Sam Randalls wondered whether ideas of climate and crisis in the 1970s were simply mimicking the kinds of terms and narratives of other forms of crisis during the period, whether that be energy or food, and to what extent climate ideas helped shape those other crises or whether that sort of process only happened much later. Sam also highlighted Vladimir Jankovi?’s work that discusses how climate was increasingly framed as a resource to be managed at a time when resources themselves were considered to be in crisis—for example oil—and wondered about the connection between the resource and crisis framings. Reuben responded to Sam’s prompts by highlighting arguments that crisis is endemic to capitalism until it eventually brings on its own terminal crisis, so all the crisis narratives were interlinked.
Jon then highlighted the second factor that he felt was missing from the workshop—the idea that climate was a stable entity on the politically meaningful timescale for the vast majority of people during the 1970s—and asked whether the workshop’s focus on climate change perhaps was more reflective of current climate discourse. Frank responded to Jon by arguing that the conference papers were sensitive to wider contexts that complicate contemporary conceptions of climate change as a standout issue.
Frank then discussed how the theme of the workshop required an interdisciplinary approach, including social and political histories, but that traditionally the history of climate studies has been dominated by historians of science. Robert agreed, saying that it was a positive sign that there were non-historians of science at the workshop, but that there were challenges in that scholars without scientific training often have a lack of confidence in commenting on and sometimes critiquing climate research, especially in today’s charged environment.
Angela Cassidy highlighted how present crises are often designated as future crises, and asked to what extent climate was seen as a potential future crisis in the 1970s. Angela also wanted to ask about the deeper reasons why climate became such a dominant issue amongst environmental problems, saying that it is increasingly recognized in biodiversity research that environmental issues are intertwined. In answer to the second question, Frank recalled Spencer Weart’s argument that heatwaves had some influence on the rise of climate discourse. Eleanor highlighted how flexible climate change is in supercharging pre-existing and long-running discourses, especially around environmental determinism. She also suggested that there may be some connections between climate and youth movements and their highly moralistic narratives. Madison warned that scholars had to be careful to define what was meant by climate “winning” against other environmental issues, and that there would be a combination of explanations from across the disciplinary spectrum to answer that question once it was framed. Andrew said that the question could be reframed to ask why other environmental issues “failed,” highlighting overpopulation as a pertinent example. The fascinating discussion continued, but unfortunately the recording cut off.
Overall, the workshop proved fruitful and intellectually generative. We brought together a wide range of scholars from a number of continents and varying disciplines, and were introduced to a range of important and previously unseen historical arguments. Ultimately, what we found was that despite the 1970s being somewhat overlooked in the existing literature, there is an emerging and vibrant interest in the period from a range of scholars internationally. In this workshop, we found that the dominant ways in which climate change discourse was taking form were through its many framings (e.g. through contrasting apocalyptic and cautious narratives in US politics or as useable knowledge for industry), the institutions that were being built or were key in shaping research agendas (e.g. funding bodies and intergovernmental forums), the material, socio-political challenges and conflicts associated with energy (e.g. in the Niger Delta), and the futures being imagined in times of instability and crisis. We would like to reiterate our thanks to ICHM and BSHS for providing core funding for the workshop. We would also like to express our thanks to CHSTM and the Northern Environmental History Network for their support. This event will be followed by a sister workshop on similar themes at the Australian National University in Canberra, to be held on November 6–7 2024. The Canberra workshop is generously sponsored by the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Centre for the Study of the Inland, La Trobe University.