by Julia Schubert
Fulbright Doctoral Visiting Scholar at CIRES Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
University of Colorado at Boulder

(Image above: Oldest series of weather maps in the United States. January 30, 1843. Produced by James Pollard Espy. Source: Image ID: wea05013, NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) Collection.)

Climate change is arguably one of the most prominent and pressing problems of our time. While the atomic threat dominated the 1960s, and awareness of environmental risks arose predominantly in the 1970s, anthropogenic climate change significantly shapes the beginning of the 21st century as its defining challenge. But how exactly was this issue of climate change discovered? How did it emerge as the epitome of a modern ‘Grand Societal Challenge’ as displayed in countless political pamphlets and organizational mission statements? And, going even further, how do societal problems in general arise?

The simple answer is: We fabricate them. Or, more precisely, they are historically and culturally contingent – building on observations shaping and institutions stabilizing them. These contingent and fragile problem ‘framings’ are thus defined by distinct societal (e.g. religious, scientific, political or economic) observations. And the assertiveness of these observations is in turn dependent on their stabilization in respective institutions, perpetuating a distinct problem-frame. Following this perspective, problems are far from being simply given. Retracing the diverse historical trajectories of climate change as a modern ‘Grand Challenge’, thus illustrates the fundamentally social construction of societal problems. This, of course, does not question or even regard the physical underpinnings of anthropogenic climate change. It rather emphasizes that we are fundamentally shaping its necessarily social reality and therein its configuration as a ‘Grand Societal Challenge’.

Changing and disruptive climatic conditions were observed as early as at the beginning of the 17th century (cf. Parker 2013), some scholars even argue for first observations of climatic change being made in antiquity (cf. Fleming 1998: 137). Importantly differing from modern observations of anthropogenic climate change, however, at the time only isolated catastrophic incidents were captured, rather than a global trend. These early disruptive climatic events such as ‘the year without a summer’ in 1814 were largely attributed to the sphere of the gods. Catastrophic climatic change, in its historical antecedent, was observed and stabilized as a religious problem (see also Hulme 2014: 12).

Wood Carving by Unknown Artist in Flammarion, C. (1888). L’atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire. Hachette. Source: Wikipedia.

For early and colonial America, climate change was a matter of national pride and an essential component of the emerging Republican national ideal. The vision was that clearing and cultivating the land would promote a warmer, less variable, and healthier climate. Thomas Jefferson was already a pronounced advocate of comprehensive meteorological measurements – yet without reliable instruments or sponsoring institutions (cf. Fleming 1998: 33). Only in the late 19th century scholars such as Svante Arrhenius (1896, 1908) and Nils Gustaf Ekholm (1901) began to systematically explore the relation of climate and society—tabulating, charting, and mapping their observations and the possibility of global anthropogenic climate change. The establishment of national weather services in Europe, Russia, and the United States allowed for the further standardization of climatic observations. Later, this led to international cooperation and even the establishment of global observation systems, significantly broadening its geographic scope (cf. Fleming 1998: 41). Thus, based on the invention of meteorological observation systems and statistical analysis, a first scientific picture of anthropogenic climate change had been stabilized, discovering and addressing it as a physical phenomenon. A pressing problem, however, was not yet in sight.

Arrangement of the wind instruments on the roof of the Headquarters Building of the Meteorological Service of the United States Signal Service. Source: Image ID: wea01316, NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) Collection, 1880, Archival Photograph by Mr. Steve Nicklas, NOS, NGS.

It was not before the 1950s, that global warming appeared on the public agenda as a first problematic version of anthropogenic climate change, immediately followed by the discussion of global cooling and the dawn of a new ice age in the 1970s. Again, scientific observation was of essence here and the cooling hypothesis was rather quickly rejected. At the end of the 20^th century this problematic observation of global anthropogenic climate change was institutionalized – a final essential step in the discovery of anthropogenic climate change as a ‘Grand Societal Challenge’. Milestones in this certification of the problem as a global issue were, for example, the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992.

Building on this institutionalization of climate change as a pressing societal problem, various responses were suggested as viable and legitimate: From the scientific challenge posed by the urgent need for better observation systems, or the political challenge of coordinating climate-friendly behavior, to the recently declared technological challenge of actively engineering the climate system to halt dangerous climate change – in each of these versions, climate change is defined as a distinct societal challenge.

Summing up, this short account of the discovery of climate change as a ‘Grand Societal Challenge’ illustrates the complex social presuppositions aiding in the historical evolution, emergence, and addressing of societal problems: Beginning with antecedent religious observations of catastrophic climatic variations, and initial meteorological measuring efforts driven by national political ideals, to the emergence of a first scientific picture of anthropogenic climate change, global warming (and cooling) finally emerged as a ‘Grand Societal Challenge’. Thus, throughout its history, the fragile problem of climate change is building on distinct observations that are in turn fundamentally bound to specific instruments, organizations and, more generally, a historically contingent problem-infrastructure.

Mauna Loa Observatory; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.

References:

Arrhenius, S. (1896). XXXI. On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground. The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 41(251), 237–276.

Ekholm, N. (1901). On the Variations of the Climate of the Geological and Historical Past and Their Causes. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 27(117), 1–62.

Fleming, J. R. (1998). Historical perspectives on climate change. Oxford University Press.

Hulme, M. (2014). Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering.

Parker, G. (2013). Global crisis: war, climate change and catastrophe in the seventeenth century. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
January 2017 Summary

January ushered in a new era for many things, including media attention to climate change. As many around the world braced for a new phase of approaches to science and the environment by the United States (US) Trump administration – who took up power on January 20th – stories focused largely on political and policy dimensions of climate change this month.

Coverage of climate change and global warming increased most prominently in the US this month, with coverage up 13% from December 2016, and 117% from the previous January. Numbers across all sources in twenty-seven countries showed a 2% increase from December 2016 overall.

A larger majority of stories appearing in US media and around the world surrounded the election of Donald J. Trump in November 2016. Reverberations throughout the country and around the world kicked up coverage. Examples included stories on Trump’s first Executive Orders re-initiating Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipeline projects, and articles on how funding would be curtailed in key federal agencies. Actions, and threats like these, sparked media attention.

To illustrate, Ian Austen and Clifford Krauss from The New York Times reported how for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump’s “revival of Keystone XL upsets a balancing act”. Stephen Mufson and Brady Dennis at The Washington Post reported on how the White House website’s energy pages, which went up within moments of Trump’s inauguration, removed references to combating climate change, a topic that had been featured prominently on the site under President Barack Obama. Betsy McKay from The Wall Street Journal reported that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it recently postponed a gathering it had planned to hold next month on the effects of climate change on health, and Coral Davenport from The New York Times reported on a freeze on federal grant spending at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Departments of the Interior, Agriculture and Health and Human Services as well as other government agencies.

Stories in January 2017 about Trump nominations for key posts in the administration – particularly for Secretary of State (former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson), EPA Administrator (Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt), Secretary of the Department of Interior (Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke) and Secretary of the Department of Energy (former Texas Governor Rick Perry) – focused mainly on worrisome dimensions of these appointments for those who care about climate and environmental protection, justice and human well-being among other things. Moreover, some media pieces also addressed cultural dimensions regarding how climate concerns were voiced in Women’s marches across the world on January 21st, and (mainly in US coverage) how ‘alt’ Twitter accounts cropped up from US National Park Services and other US agency spin-offs to communicate #climatefacts and dismay about Trump Administration plans for shifts in science, environment and climate policy engagements.

So as Barack Obama and his administration vacated the White House, media attention was paid to Donald Trump’s and his aides’ promises for swift and aggressive action to dismantle and block Obama’s climate-related policies and actions, such as incorporating the social cost of carbon to project planning and Clean Power plan regulations. Media treatments also covered how Trump administration behaviors served to embolden Republican legislative officials in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, where the elimination of regulations on coal mining near streams and rules to reduce methane emissions were said to be prioritized in the next Congressional sessions. On January 4, Chelsea Harvey from The Washington Post wrote “As a new Congress convenes this week, regulatory reform is the rage, and the upshot seems to be that at least a few of President Obama’s environmental regulations could be dismantled quickly by the Republican Congress, with President-elect Donald Trump’s approval”. Read more …

by Alexander Lee

High Country News
February 3, 2017

Five years ago, I hiked to the toe of the East Fork Glacier in Alaska’s Denali National Park. I was on my way to climb a small peak in the Alaska Range and had tracked down a photo taken in the 1920s by one of the park’s first geologists. Lining up the mountain skyline with the photo, I scrambled around until I found the exact spot where Stephen Capps stood to take the picture some 90 years earlier. The glacier had retreated nearly a mile since then.

I am an environmental philosopher, and have also worked as a glacial researcher, backcountry guide and naturalist. Seeing the dramatic disappearance of the East Fork Glacier was one of many intimate experiences I have had with a warming world.

So how do I reconcile the overwhelming evidence that the world’s atmosphere is being disrupted with the perception of the 30 percent of Americans who do not believe in climate change?

Here’s a thought experiment: If I say that there are 10 M&Ms in a bowl, and then I count the 10 M&Ms right before your eyes, you would have to “believe” me, right?

Many scientists aim to persuade climate skeptics by counting M&Ms — graphs of CO2 concentration, temperature records, and other scientifically observable measurements.

So let’s count: The United States Geological Survey has been measuring Alaska’s Gulkana and Wolverine glaciers for 50 years — the longest continuous glacier research program in North America. Both show the kind of retreat emblematic of significant regional climate change. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that Alaska is losing roughly 75 billion tons of ice annually. That’s a lot of M&Ms.

If the current preponderance of evidence fails to convince skeptics of climate change, then the issue we face is not about facts or evidence, but rather about values — about our call to heal the world.

Nearly 300 years ago, the philosopher David Hume warned in his influential work, A Treatise on Human Nature, against making claims about how the world should be strictly from statements about how the world is. If, for example, I say, “Extensive deforestation has decimated the truffula tree population,” I am not actually saying anything about whether or not the world ought to have truffula trees, or why we should change our behavior in order to protect those truffula trees. The connection between facts and values — what Hume calls a “new relation or affirmation” — needs to get us from the description of deforestation to any prescription for preservation. I could, for instance, defend the intrinsic value of the tree or argue that perpetuating extinction is wrong. Philosophers call this the “is-ought” problem. Read more …

by Abigail Ahlert, CSTPR Science Writing Intern

Meteorologist Joel Gratz takes weather prediction off the beaten path. Gratz, founder of the skier-beloved forecast company OpenSnow and alumnus of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (CSTPR) at the University of Colorado Boulder, recently created a new app for iPhones that provides forecasts for hikers of Colorado’s highest peaks. Gratz graduated from CU Boulder in three years with both an M.S. in Environmental Studies and an MBA. His new app, OpenSummit, delivers hourly temperature, wind, precipitation and lightning forecasts for every mountain in Colorado over 14,000 feet. The app is also synced with Instagram, so users can see for themselves the recent conditions at each summit. OpenSummit launched in September 2016, so summer 2017 will be its first ever 14er season.

“This was always kind of in the back of my mind, to help with forecasts for outdoorsy folks, but it’s just until recently that we’ve had the time and money to put into a new app and a new service,” says Gratz. “Eventually we want to provide forecasts for all the trails, not just 14ers.”

OpenSummit aims to help eager hikers find ideal days to climb the big peaks, giving them more enjoyable and safer conditions. Hiking above tree line, as all of these hikes require, presents a severe risk of lightning strikes. According to the National Park Service, “Each year in Rocky Mountain National Park people are injured—sometimes killed—by lightning.” The National Lightning Safety Institute ranks Colorado as 3^rd most deadly for lightning strikes behind Florida and Texas. From 1990-2003, 39 people died from lightning strikes in Colorado.

To work against these risks, OpenSummit repackages publicly available forecast data for hikers to easily access and understand. “Almost all of the data somehow starts with the National Weather Service and with the government, so it’s really just building upon decades of work that’s taxpayer funded,” says Gratz. He describes the missions of OpenSummit and OpenSnow as “specialization”, saying that the “National Weather Service, rightly so, is focused on people and property protection and potentially large events that affect large numbers of people. But the number of people that are hiking 14ers, while important, is relatively small compared to the number of people driving or traveling or living in Colorado. So, this is just solving a problem that I didn’t find being addressed by the National Weather Service or by other private weather companies. “

Indeed, Gratz is no stranger to filling forecast niches. His powder forecasts started as an email chain to his friends in 2007 and transformed into OpenSnow by 2011. OpenSnow provides mountain-specific forecasts, webcams, and snow reports for hundreds of ski destinations across the globe. While it’s difficult to know the impacts of these forecasts on ski resort turn out, Gratz is confident in the reach of OpenSnow. “In a lot of the locations where we’re the strongest—here in Colorado and in Utah and Tahoe—our forecasters are looked at as the main local forecasters for those mountain regions…And just by the number of people that are using our service and the number of partners that are advertising with us, my gut feeling is that we have a pretty good influence.” The OpenSnow app and website see about 2 million visitors each ski season and have over 40,000 likes on Facebook.

While OpenSnow has established itself as a reliable source of winter weather predictions, mountain forecasting almost always presents unique challenges. Local knowledge and experience can go a long way in better forecasting, and this benefits regions like Colorado and Utah where OpenSnow has forecasters on the ground. But the organization also produces snowfall predictions for ski resorts in Europe, Canada and Japan, relying almost solely on weather model data. Gratz notes that even over the last nine years, weather models have greatly improved as researchers have refined model physics and parameterizations, and higher resolution runs have become possible. “Because of the higher resolution ensembles, we’re able to take some of the ensemble data and weight it a little more than the operational runs, which try to smooth out the peaks and valleys. So while we may miss out on some of the extreme events, what we’re not going to do, hopefully, is come up with big misses. Like telling someone it’s going to snow a foot and then 6 hours later drop that forecast down to 2 inches,” says Gratz, adding with a laugh, “Because that really makes people mad, me included.”

Looking forward, the future of mountain ski resorts is uncertain in the face of climate change. Organizations such as Protect Our Winters and the National Ski Areas Association (both headquartered in Colorado) currently work to educate outdoor enthusiasts about the threat of climate change. Increasing temperatures in mountain regions could potentially decrease snowpack levels and ski season length, placing ski resorts at economic risk. Referring to the impact of climate change on powder days, Gratz says, “People ask me a lot about this. The answer, like most things, is multi-faceted. One, ski areas are expanding into summer sports, which is intelligent beyond climate change because it’s better to have a 12-month business than a 6-month business…Two, I share with people locally, looking at climate change studies and weather stations, that temperatures have gone up, but there’s really no trend in precipitation here in Colorado. But with increased temperatures and equal precipitation we can make reasonable assumptions that potentially you would get more rain in the shoulder seasons [generally late spring and fall], or at least potentially earlier snowmelt and more drought when it’s warmer with more evaporation.”

Gratz explains that the ski industry has a particularly complicated relationship with greenhouse gas emissions, since its activities often contribute to the problem. “I have a personal qualm about this because all of us skiers are getting in our cars and driving all over the place to go chase powder,” says Gratz. “Some of us are riding in snowcats to go chase powder, some of us are getting in helicopters to go ski powder, a lot of us are flying all over the world to go ski powder. I mean, I’m one of them—I went to Japan last year and it was awesome—so I have a personal difficulty lecturing people about what to do.”

Feeling caught in a tough position, Gratz skirts around the reprimands and sticks to educating skiers about observable trends in the mountains. On any given day, his role is part scientist, part businessman and part communicator—a balance that he developed during his time as a master’s student at CSTPR. “I was able to continue to focus on science, but be exposed to policy and be exposed to business and be exposed to people who were trying to integrate a lot of those things,” says Gratz of his time at CSTPR. “So I wasn’t pigeonholed into creating a better equation. I wasn’t pigeonholed into just writing policy briefs. I wasn’t just doing financial analysis. It kind of allowed me to do it all and throw it all together. And for me that’s exactly what I wanted, and effectively what I do every day.”