Second Only to Nuclear War: Science and the Making of Existential Threat in Global Climate Governance

Climate change moved rapidly up the international political agenda between 1979 and 1988. What explains this shift? Existing explanations focus on how an international epistemic community built a scientific consensus that informed state interests by reducing uncertainty. However, in 1988 scientists actually heightened uncertainty about the future consequences of climate change by depicting it as a security threat “second only to a global nuclear war.” To account for this, I integrate insights from science and technology studies and securitization theory. In doing so, I theorize how scientists speak the grammar of security and construct existential threats. I argue that scientists catalyzed political action in the climate case by drawing on ideas about time, technology, and humanity’s place in the universe. I conduct a discourse analysis of key scientific texts in the 1980s to uncover the frames and discourses scientists used to place climate change on the international political agenda.