Two articles published online last year in the British Journal for the History of Science address efforts in the mid-to-late 20th century to harmonize global programs in environmental science with their international scientific and political contexts. The first involves the creation of an ambitious, 15-year scientific initiative, while the second involves a landmark effort to produce scientific consensus. Both are major events in the career of Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin.

The Global Atmospheric Research Program

An article by Matthias Heymann explores the development of the Global Atmospheric Research Program, or GARP, a multinational campaign of atmospheric studies that ran from 1967 to 1982 with the aim of increasing weather forecasting accuracy and investigating climatic changes. GARP’s three key organizers were American meteorologists Jule Charney and Thomas Malone and their Swedish colleague Bolin, who all went to great lengths to make the program into the truly global network of observations that they envisioned.

Hosted under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council of Scientific Unions, GARP was modeled to a degree on the International Geophysical Year initiative of 1957 and 1958, that fount of so many Cold War-era large-scale projects in space science and environmental observation.

Even before it concluded, the IGY was heralded as not only the largest scientific endeavor ever undertaken, but also a feat of collaboration and unity for scientists all over the world. Brought together by shared values, research methods, and concerns, scientists from sixty-six nations were to collect and share global data that would transform understanding of natural phenomena and humans’ capacity to observe them. Showcase outcomes included the discovery of radiation belts in the magnetosphere by James Van Allen and the launch of the Soviet artificial satellite Sputnik.

The organizers of GARP would strive to emulate the scientific and diplomatic successes of the IGY. Following in the footsteps of an earlier global scientific initiative, however, was no guarantee of easy passage, in part because the effort was expensive, involving satellite launches and a campaign of balloon observations. It was also enmeshed with military agendas and national security issues as, by the 1960s, improved weather forecasting had become a major focus for the US Department of Defense.

In short, GARP’s subject matter, the Earth’s atmosphere, had already become a battlefield of the Cold War. Launching an international research program in this discipline meant arduous negotiations for intergovernmental approval, for which GARP organizers turned to the United Nations. It also entailed coordinating across a complicated network of international scientific societies, such as the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, and the Committee on Space Research, or COSPAR.

One formidable challenge was ensuring the participation of Soviet scientists, which called for direct communication across the Iron Curtain. Heymann notes that Bolin and Malone traveled to Moscow in 1964 to discuss the initiative with Soviet colleagues.

This subject is of personal interest to me, and my own files include a trip diary that Charney kept, when he made a six-week reconnaissance trip to the USSR in 1961 to establish and strengthen relationships with Soviet atmospheric scientists. During the trip, for which he took four months of Russian language study, he met with dozens of researchers, including the deans of Soviet climatology and global ecology, Mikhail Budyko and Kirill Kondratiev. After gently probing them about working together, Charney noted in his diary: “He [Budyko] held out little hope for American-Russian scientific cooperation in the existing political climate. Kondratiev, in contrast, was more optimistic.” Ultimately, GARP did secure Soviet participation.

Those further interested in negotiations surrounding GARP should look up Erik Conway’s chapter, “The world according to GARP: Scientific internationalism and the construction of global meteorology, 1961–1980,” in the 2007 volume Science in Uniform, Uniforms in Science. In 2022, Chris Garrett published an article in Notes and Records tightly focused on a 1963 visit by Bob Stewart of the University of British Columbia to the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Moscow. Stewart later chaired GARP’s Joint Organizing Committee from 1972 to 1976.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

As a pioneer of carbon dioxide studies, Bert Bolin is also prominently featured in an article by Carolina Granado on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which takes us forward in time to the late 1980s.

Here again, Bolin, as the IPCC’s inaugural chair, acts as a catalyst of dialogue and organizer of a multinational body of experts at the intersection of science and politics. The paper also addresses the question of to what extent past models and experiences in creating multinational scientific bodies can facilitate negotiating future ones. Bolin already had the GARP development under his belt, but it wasn’t exclusively his earlier work organizing large-scale initiatives that set him up for success with establishing the IPCC.

Granado centers her argument around Bolin’s chosen negotiation strategies and personality. Valued by colleagues and counterparts for his “honesty, leadership and resilience, which made him one of the few climate scientists with sufficient political and diplomatic skills to persuade the world to tackle the climate issue,” he was indeed the perfect man for the job. What is coded in the article as Bolin’s advantageous “non-scientific criteria”—his character and outlook on life—can also be viewed as the author’s contribution to the history of emotions, lately a popular topic in diplomatic history.

In his role as a spokesperson for the IPCC, Bolin was in no small measure a visionary. One of his strengths was knowing and appealing to his audiences’ interests and needs. And each group required a tailored approach. Meticulously crafted speeches before leaders of stakeholder nations aimed to inform without overwhelming, motivate feasible action, and alleviate possible concerns and points of resistance.

Presentations were less effective in the private sector and industry, so Bolin assumed advisory positions within these structures to communicate the significance of addressing climate change. By 1988 he had garnered high acclaim and authority in international scientific circles, so communication with colleagues was the most familiar if not natural medium.

Bolin’s skills extended well beyond public speaking. At the core of his efforts with the IPCC was cultivating trust and productive dialogue between scientific experts and a variety of policymakers and stakeholders at the global scale—and the IPCC was, perhaps, a rare example of success in that infamously laborious endeavor. Granado’s study of Bolin and the IPCC bears comparison with test ban treaty negotiations over underground nuclear test verification. Scientific expertise prevailed in both cases by way of scientists’ proactive negotiating strategies, developing trust across interest groups, and making expertise accessible to the public.

The climate change debate was (and continues to be) fraught, and having it inform global environmental policies meant being ready for controversy. Bolin was well aware of the thin line IPCC was treading and developed strategies to address misinterpretation of reported findings and the panel’s motivations, accusations of engaging in advocacy, polarization of opinions, and so on. Granado cites correspondence from 1992, in which Bolin “also stated the IPCC never recommended what should be done, but rather talked about the likely consequences of alternative actions or no actions at all.”

Heymann and Granado bring into focus not only the social institutions of science and politics, but—just as important—scientists as individuals. Tracing Charney’s, Bolin’s, and Malone’s efforts in building the GARP structure and Bolin’s individual contributions to the establishment and early successes of IPCC highlights their strategies in pursuing these programs and the craft of communicating scientific expertise in the world of policymakers.

Anna Doel
American Institute of Physics
adoel@aip.org

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