Article ID: CBB151921631

Climate state: Science-state struggles and the formation of climate science in the US from the 1930s to 1960s (December 2017)

unapi

This article has two aims: first, to understand the co-production of climate science and the state, and second, to provide a test case for Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. To these ends, the article reconstructs the historical formation of a US climate science field, with an analytic focus on inter-field dynamics and heterogeneous networking practices. Drawing from primary- and secondary-source materials, the historical analysis focuses on relations between scientists and state actors from the 1930s to the 1960s. The account shows how actors with positions linking scientific and bureaucratic fields constructed critical nodes and ‘hinges’ that co-produced war-making and state expansion on the one hand, and a relatively autonomous climate science field on the other. The analysis explains the emergence of climate science by focusing on the WWII-era transformation of meteorology and oceanography into distinct disciplines, the emergence of ‘basic’ research as a central principle of post-war government, and the formation of a climate science field by the 1960s centered on computerized modeling and populated by an interdisciplinary scientific elite. The article concludes by indicating how these processes led to the subsequent development of climate change as a science–state conundrum that has reorganized the climate science field in recent decades.

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Authors & Contributors
Lorenzo Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla
Baker, Zeke
Death, Carl
Chester S. Dunning
Stefano Tibaldi
Ioana Popa
Concepts
Climate and climatology
Meteorology
Earth sciences
Cold War
Climate change
Science and politics
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
18th century
21st century
Early modern
17th century
Places
United States
Soviet Union
Polar regions
Italy
Tropics
Antarctica
Institutions
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
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