Recently, certain members of the scientific community have framed anthropogenic climate change as an invitation to reimagine the practice of science. These calls to reinvent science coalesce around the notion of “usable” knowledge, signaling the impulse to ensure that research will serve the needs of those impacted by climate change. But how novel is this concept? I will argue that usable science cannot be equated with nineteenth-century “useful knowledge” nor twentieth-century “applied science.” It is indeed new, but it is not as new as scientists today would have us think. I will show that the history of usable climate science begins with the formulation of the “CO2 problem” as such in the late 1970s—an observation that, unfortunately, calls into question the optimism of the concept’s more recent adherents.