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Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in science. They do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust in science: polls show that American attitudes toward science are highly polarized along political lines. In this essay, we argue that conservative hostility toward science is rooted in conservative hostility toward government regulation of the marketplace, which has morphed in recent decades into conservative hostility to government, tout court. This distrust was cultivated by conservative business leaders for nearly a century, but took strong hold during the Reagan administration, largely in response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited governmental response. Thus, science-particularly environmental and public health science-became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes. We argue that contemporary distrust of science is mostly collateral damage, a spillover from carefully orchestrated conservative distrust of government.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology had its origins in a student project to develop rocket propulsion in the late 1930s. It attracted funding from the U.S. Army just prior to U.S. entry into World War II and became an Army missile research facility in 1943. Because of its origins as a contractor-operated Army research facility, JPL is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) only contractor-operated field center. It remains a unit of the California Institute of Technology. In the decades since its founding, the laboratory, first under U.S. Army direction and then as a NASA field center, has grown and evolved into an internationally recognized institution generally seen as a leader in solar system exploration but whose portfolio includes substantial Earth remote sensing. JPL’s history includes episodes where the course of the laboratory’s development took turning points into new directions. After developing short-range ballistic missiles for the Army, the laboratory embarked on a new career in lunar and planetary exploration through the early 1970s and abandoned its original purpose as a propulsion technology laboratory. It developed the telecommunications infrastructure for planetary exploration too. It diversified into Earth science and astrophysics in the late 1970s and, due to a downturn in funding for planetary exploration, returned to significant amounts of defense work in the 1980s. The end of the Cold War between 1989 and 1991 resulted in a declining NASA budget, but support for planetary exploration actually improved within NASA management—as long as that exploration could be done more cheaply. This resulted in what is known as the “Faster Better Cheaper” period in NASA history. For JPL, this ended in 2000, succeeded by a return to more rigorous technical standards and increased costs.

Historyk z przyszlości, zyjący w Drugiej Chinskiej Republice Ludowej przywoluje wydarzenia Okresu Polcienia (1988–2093), ktore doprowadzily do Wielkiego Upadku i Masowej Migracji (2073–2093). Zastanawia sie on, dlaczego przedstawiciele tzw. Cywilizacji Zachodniej w XX oraz na początku XXI wieku zignorowali solidną wiedze naukową na temat zmiany klimatycznej, dopuszczając do katastrofalnych zdarzen, ktore przesądzily o ich upadku. Jak doszlo do tego, ze samooszukiwanie zakorzenione w ideologicznym zafiksowaniu na idei rzekomo „wolnego” rynku obezwladnilo najpotezniejsze narody świata w obliczu tragedii destabilizacji klimatu?

No book about the science of climate reconstruction would be complete if it did not also address the organized efforts to reject and obfuscate that science. This chapter begins with passages adapted from Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010), which were kindly shared by the authors and publisher. This path-breaking work uncovered links among the tactics and agents involved in organized efforts to cast doubt and disrepute on research and researchers who have demonstrated how certain profitable enterprises have negative health and environmental externalities. Here, we have extended Oreskes and Conway’s account with a discussion of global warming denial in Europe and in Australia.

Authors' note: Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and (possible) future. The occasion is the tercentenary of the end of Western culture (1540 – 2073); the dilemma being addressed is how we – the children of the Enlightenment – failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold. Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world's powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind – even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People's Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988 – 2073) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2074).

In recent decades, historians and sociologists of science have been largely concerned with the social construction of scientific knowledge. This paper examines an important historical episode in the social deconstruction of scientific knowledge. In the early 1980s, a consensus emerged among climate scientists that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels would lead to mean global warming of 2–3°C, probably by the mid-twenty-first century, and would have serious deleterious effects, including sea level rise of at least seventy centimeters. This consensus was challenged, however, by a committee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, chaired by physicist William A. (Bill) Nierenberg, whose 1983 report arguably launched the climate change "debate." Drawing on perspectives provided by two economists on his committee, Nierenberg reframed the question not as a matter of climate change per se, but as a matter of the human capacity to adapt to change when it came, a capacity, his report asserted, that was very great. Thus, while accepting the scientific conclusion that warming would occur, Nierenberg rejected the interpretation that it would be a problem. In later years, he would play a major role in political challenges to the scientific conclusions themselves. Reframing was Nierenberg's first step on the road to the deconstruction of scientific knowledge of climate change.

A key issue in history of technology that has received little attention is the use of simulation in engineering design. This article explores the use of both mechanical and numerical simulation in the design of the Mars atmospheric entry phases of the Viking and Mars Pathfinder missions to argue that engineers used both kinds of simulation to develop knowledge of their designs' likely behavior in the poorly known environment of Mars. Each kind of simulation could be used as a warrant of the other's fidelity, in an iterative process of knowledge construction.

In the late 20th century, remote sensing from space offered a means of resolving one of the principal challenges plaguing physical oceanographers, poor spatial sampling. But in fact, remote sensing offered an opposing problem–so much data that the traditional oceanographic institutions were not equipped to cope with it. NASA decided to resolve this problem by having the Jet Propulsion Laboratory construct an oceanographic data center at its Pasadena facility. This represents a new kind of scientific institution, whose purpose is the development, validation, and distribution of scientific data to third-party users. Since 1990, NASA has established several such facilities, each rooted in a subset of the Earth science disciplines and each making its data publicly available via the Internet. In so doing, it reversed a decades-old policy that had given an instrument's science team proprietary privileges. Agency leaders did this to expand scientific demand for NASA's capabilities, thus buttressing the agency's political support; because they believed remote sensing could enable great scientific strides; because they thought open access to data would foster competition and thus produce better scientific results; and because they believed that publicly-funded data should be public. In the process, they created a “market” for oceanographic data far larger than that represented by professional oceanographers.

This paper introduces the five papers that follow, all of which were originally presented at a workshop titled "Monitoring the Environment: Scales, Methods, and Systems in Historical Perspective." The workshop, sponsored by the Society for the History of Technology and the American Society for Environmental History, examined past efforts to develop tools, methods, and systems for measuring or monitoring some aspect of the physical environment. Four of the papers included here focus on various aspects of air quality monitoring; the fifth has to do with monitoring the earth from space. Despite differences in time period and approach, each article examines how specific tools and methods--and the motivations for developing those tools and methods--evolved. Among other things, these papers make clear that systems for monitoring various aspects of the physical environment are shaped by a variety of stakeholders and suggest that efforts to construct such systems should not be viewed as a purely technical task.

A series of dramatic mid‐air collisions during the late 1950s caused the United States to embark on a reconstruction of its air traffic control system. In pursuit of the concept of ‘positive control’ over all aircraft, the Federal Aviation Agency modified and deployed military technologies under orders to eliminate these highly public catastrophes. In the process, it curtailed one of flight's great dreams, freedom of the skies, imposing technological and procedural requirements on fliers wanting access to urban airspace. Resistance from private fliers produced modification of some of the agency's plans, causing it to adapt its planned airspace structures to permit private fliers limited access without having to submit to the control system.

L'article retrace le developpement d'un systeme d'assistance a l'atterrissage pour l'aviation depuis le debut du XXe siecle. Le premier systeme experimente fut l'oeuvre des americains dans les annees 20 et se developpa rapidement. Histoire de ce systeme d'approche qui revolutionna l'aviation civile et permit de resoudre les problemes de pilotage dans des conditions atmospheriques difficiles.

On January 17, 2003, novelist Michael Crichton gave Caltech’s Michelin Lecture. Its title was Aliens Cause Global Warming. “I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming.”1 His paper begins with an attack on the Drake equation and SETI, then on Carl Sagan and nuclear winter, and then finally expands to an attack on all scientific modeling. Since one can choose any set of values to base a model calculation on (according to Crichton), any result is possible. Thus modeling is a religion, and global warming theology, not science.

The International Geophysical Year (IGY) is famous for a number of important legacies. One is for the iconic graph of rising CO2 emissions, the Keeling Chart.1 Another is for its stimulus to polar exploration and the establishment of permanent research facilities in Antarctica.2 The third is the “space race” between the United States and the Soviet Union, initially to launch the first satellite and then to put humans into orbit.3

As climate scientists battle climate sceptics, they should note that we have been here before, say Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. History holds lessons for how researchers can get their message across.