Rolando García: Refugee, Radical, Climate's Attorney at Law

With a few exceptions, the history of climate studies is currently dominated by work on scientists from North America and Europe, often those with stable socio‐economic backgrounds and uncontroversial or unstated political beliefs. The story of Rolando Victor García Boutigue (1919–2012) is a precious example of how a radical scholar from South America responded to the emergence of climate discussion in the 1970s. Having grown up in a poor household in Argentina, García was thrown out of his undergraduate studies due to his student union activities in 1943. He then worked for Argentina's National Weather Service, through which he was able to study meteorology in the United States under Jörgen Holmboe. He returned to Argentina to become the Dean of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, but left again in 1966 after being physically attacked by police under orders of a right‐wing military coup. Following a move to Geneva, he became the director of joint planning staff at the Global Atmospheric Research Programme. In 1976, he was appointed to lead a substantial project investigating the impacts of early 1970s climate anomalies under the auspices of the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study, leading to the publication of Nature Pleads Not Guilty (1981), which laid a considerable portion of the blame for severe famines at the feet of US policy and the functioning of international food markets. García also became a noted philosopher, and his philosophical leanings had an important influence on his work on climate and vice versa.This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Thought Leaders Climate, History, Society, Culture > World Historical Perspectives Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development