Hamblin 9
third world
objections to international environmental negotiations
- poor countries need
economic development--is pollution an inevitable part
of the early stages
- we shouldn't be limited by
regulations to fix the mess caused by rich countries,
not by us
- this is just cold war
posturing
Nixon banned biological warfare, political posturing
rather than focusing on more immediate practical issues
(both environmental and nuclear weapons)
Weather control became part of this political game
playing:
- research on modifying
hurricanes was shut down in 1974
- the track to the right is
Hurricane Ginger, one that was seeded on Sept. 26,
1971 (in the slow moving white U shape), supposedly
with no effect
- the danger of playing with
forces we cannot control
- weather modification had
been used in Vietnam, trying to lengthen the rainy
season to slow enemy troop movements
UN negotiations for a treaty
to ban environmental warfare left out most practical
military uses, but it was hard to draw that line
"A cosmetic treaty with large
loopholes"
what environmental modification is temporary and what
could cause long-term large-scale harm?
publicity
about the treaty negotiations helped convince the public
that human-caused environmental catastrophe was possible
catastrophic
environmentalism--
- do we have the
technological/scientific power to fundamentally change
the earth? people are beginning to believe we do
- books in the 1970s about
coming environmental doom with the goal of persuading
the public we need to do something
- doomsday rhetoric may have
turned the public off science--no longer predicting
science will give us a better life
- do you argue for environmental
improvements on the basis of quality of life or on the
basis of predictions of doom
background philosophical
issue: do humans now have the power to modify the
earth's environment in fundamental ways?
- Meanwhile it took until
the 1970s until research meteorologists were finally
becoming convinced that increasing levels of carbon
dioxide could change world climate
- now the scientists are
engaged but the public is tired of doomsaying