“Today, we think of climate science as different from air pollution, but in the ’60s, they were very much intertwined,” says co-author Colleen Lanier-Christensen. How much was known at mid-20th century about the dangers of human-caused climate change? A lot more than the most Americans think. With a new paper in the Ecology Law Quarterly , Naomi Oreskes and a team of science historians detail more than a century of research connecting carbon dioxide emissions with global temperature rise. The findings illuminate what Congress knew, and what it intended, when targeting “air pollution” with the 1970 Clean Air Act, questions that arose during a landmark 2022 Supreme Court ruling limiting the power of federal agencies to enforce the law. “We found a universe of scientific work that got lost, forgotten, or buried,” said Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science. Oreskes hopes it will serve as a definitive account ofwhat was understood by the 1950s and ’60s about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. At 124 pages, the paper surfaces everything from government reports on “inadvertent weather modification” to long-dead lawmakers pondering the future of electric vehicles. It establishes that the era’s experts saw CO 2 as one of many environmental threats to regulate. “We found a universe of scientific work that got lost, forgotten, or buried.” Naomi Oreskes “Today, we think of climate science as different from air pollution,” offered co-author Colleen Lanier-Christensen , Ph.D. ’23, a postdoctoral fellow in the History of Science. “But in the ’60s, they were very much intertwined.” Oreskes started investigating the topic about 10 years ago, originally at the behest of environmental law expert Jody Freeman , the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. But the project became all the more urgent with the Supreme […]