Event Description
As an interdisciplinary hub at Columbia University, the Center for Science and Society is home to students and scholars in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Our Advisory Committee is made up of 48 faculty members across 28 departments including anthropology; climate; history; medical ethics; Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies; and philosophy. To celebrate the Advisory Committee's newest members, the Center is launching a new faculty spotlight lunch series.
Historians of science often point to the late 1970s as a pivotal period in the history of climate change science, a moment when the scientific community began to converge on a consensus about the likely degrees of warming that could be expected from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Yet while documenting the transformation of climate from backwater curiosity to state-of-the-art science and the erstwhile accumulation of scientific studies that grew increasingly confident in the reality of anthropogenic climate change, this historiography has largely overlooked the extent to which scientists at this time were pessimistic about the prospects for curbing fossil fuel dependence. For many scientists in North America and Western Europe, the multiple, overlapping oil-related tribulations of the 1970s had revealed the apparent limits of the world’s capacity—or even willingness—to turn against fossil fuels. Even in the face of the widespread economic and social upheavals that the oil shocks of 1973 had wrought, for example, countries like the United States remained stubbornly wedded to fossil fuels. The oil politics of the 1970s thus led many scientists to conclude that adaptation, rather than prevention, was the only realistic path forward. This talk explores how the political realities of fossil fuel dependence constrained ideas about the realm of possibility for climate politics and offers a new model—beyond the climate denialist framework that currently dominates both the popular imaginary and climate historiography—for understanding the history of climate politics.
Event Speaker
Leah Aronowsky, Assistant Professor of Climate at Columbia University
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Contact [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the Center for Science and Society. This event is part of the Faculty Spotlight Event Series, highlighting the work of Advisory Committee members.
The Center for Science and Society makes every reasonable effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend a Center for Science and Society event, please contact us at [email protected] or (212) 854-0666 at least 10 days in advance of the event. For more information, please visit the campus accessibility webpage.
