• 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

• most of the game being played was cold war posturing
• the result was the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile use of Environmental Modification Techniques, 1977
  

"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