International Cooperation

By the very nature of climate, scientists had to study it across national boundaries. Already in the 19th century, meteorologists formed occasional international collaborations and simple coordinating bodies. From the 1950s onward these expanded into ever larger and more elaborately organized global programs involving thousands of experts. The programs chiefly studied daily weather, not climate. But when research pointed to the possibility of global warming, it raised scientific questions that could only be addressed through international cooperative studies, and policy questions that required international negotiations. Scientists elaborated the network of research organizations, and struggled to work out a consensus of reasonably certain conclusions about climate to guide policy-makers. In the 1980s, international conferences and new types of scientific groups began to shape the agendas of governments to a degree that had little precedent in other areas of world politics. The culmination was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol [which went into effect in 2004], a first step toward limiting greenhouse emissions. (There is a separate essay on the United States Government, which was central in international affairs.)

After 1988

Global warming was now firmly in place as an international issue. In many countries it was hotly debated in national politics. The scientific community itself was taking up the topic with far greater enthusiasm than ever. Conferences proliferated, demanding time from researchers, government officials, and environmental and industry lobbyists. As one conference delegate put it, the “traveling circus” of the greenhouse effect debate had begun. In the early 1980s, there had been only a few conferences each year where scientists presented papers on climate change, but in 1990 there were about 40, and in 1997 more than 100.+

Hopes that the Toronto agreement would do for CO2 what the Montreal agreement had done for ozone soon dwindled. Greenhouse gases could not command the strong scientific consensus that had quickly formed for the ozone danger. There was no dramatically visible proof, like the “ozone hole” images presented to the public. And vastly greater economic forces were at stake.

Most informed people understood by now that the climate change issue could not be handled in either of the two easiest ways. Scientists were not going to prove that there was nothing to worry about. Nor were they about to prove exactly how climate would change, and tell what should be done about it. Just spending more money on research would no longer be a sufficient response (not that governments had ever spent enough). For the scientists were not limited by the sort of simple ignorance that could be overcome with clever studies. A medical researcher can find the effects of a drug by giving a thousand patients one pill and another thousand patients a different one, but climate scientists did not have two Earths with different levels of greenhouse gases to compare. Our neighbor planets Mars and Venus, one with almost no gases and the other with an enormous amount, showed only lethal extremes. Scientists could look at the Earth’s own climate in different geological epochs, but they found no record of a period when CO2 was injected into the atmosphere as rapidly as was happening now. Or they could build elaborate computer models and vary the numbers that represented the level of gases, but critics could point out many ways the models failed to represent the real planet. These hardly seemed convincing ways to tell the civilized world how it should reorganize the way everyone lived.

Of course, people make all their important decisions in uncertainty. Every social policy and business plan is based on guesswork. But global warming was still invisible. It would not have become an issue at all except for scientists. Somehow the scientists would now have to give the world practical advice—yet without abandoning the commitment to strict rules of evidence and reasoning that made them scientists in the first place.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, inevitably under the judicious chairmanship of Bert Bolin, established itself as the principal source of scientific advice to governments. The IPCC’s method was to set up independent Working Groups to address the various issues. Unlike the First World Climate Conference, the Villach meetings, and the workshops of the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases, this was a large-scale and explicitly intergovernmental undertaking. The IPCC worked hard to draw nearly all the world’s climate experts into the process through meetings, drafting of reports, and a great volume of correspondence.

Experts wrote working papers that drew on the latest studies, including some not yet published. These were debated at length in correspondence and workshops. Through 1989, the IPCC scientists, 170 of them in a dozen workshops, worked hard and long to craft statements that nobody could fault on scientific grounds. The draft reports next went through a process of review, gathering comments from virtually every climate expert in the world. The scientists found it easier than they had expected to reach a consensus. But any conclusions had to be endorsed by a consensus of government delegates, many of whom were not scientists at all.

Among the officials, the most eloquent and passionate in arguing for strong statements were representatives of small island nations. For they had learned that rising sea levels could erase their territories from the map.+ Far more powerful were the oil, coal, and automobile industries, represented not only by their own lobbyists but also by governments of nations living off fossil fuels, like Saudi Arabia. The negotiations were intense. Only the fear of an embarrassing collapse pushed people through the grueling sessions to grudging agreement. Under pressure from the industrial forces, and obeying the mandate to make only statements that virtually every knowledgeable scientist could endorse, the IPCC’s consensus statements were highly qualified and cautious. This was not “mainstream” science so much as conservative, lowest-common-denominator science. When the IPCC finally announced its conclusions, however, they had solid credibility.

Issued in 1990, the first IPCC Report concluded that the world had indeed been warming. Much of this might be caused by natural processes, the report conceded. The scientists predicted (correctly) that it would take another decade before they could be confident that the change was caused by the greenhouse effect. But the panel, drawing on computer studies, thought it likely that by the middle of the next century there could be a warming of somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5°C (roughly 2.5 to 8°F). The report specifically rejected the objection, raised by a small group of skeptical scientists, that the main cause of any observed changes was solar variations. The IPCC also drew attention to potent greenhouse gases other than CO2, hinting at economically sound steps that the world might take at once to reduce future warming.+

The report did not silence the scientists who held that global warming was unlikely. The IPCC consensus, hammered out through an exhausting cycle of negotiations among leading experts, offered no certainty. And no single statement, however tentative, could represent the views of all scientists on such a complex and uncertain matter. To find out what the entire community of climate experts felt, several different people conducted surveys in the early 1990s.

The responses suggested that most scientists felt their understanding of climate change was poor, and the future climate was highly uncertain—even more uncertain than indicated by the IPCC’s report (at least as the news media described it). Nevertheless, a majority of climate experts did believe that significant global warming was likely to happen, even if they couldn’t prove it. Asked to rank their certainty about this on a scale from one to ten, the majority picked a number near the middle. Only a few climate experts (perhaps one in ten) were fairly confident that there would be no global warming at all—although as they pointed out, scientific truth is not reached by taking a vote. Roughly two-thirds of the scientists polled felt that there was enough evidence in hand to make it reasonable for the world to start taking policy steps to lessen the danger, just in case. A considerable minority thought there was a serious risk that greenhouse warming could yank the climate into a seriously different state. On one thing nearly all scientists agreed: the future was likely to see “surprises,” deviations from the climate as currently understood.+

The IPCC had written its report in preparation for a Second World Climate Conference, held in November 1990. Strongly influenced by the IPCC’s conclusions, the conference wound up with a strong call for policy action. This induced the United Nations General Assembly to call for negotiations towards an international agreement that might restrain global warming. Lengthy discussions, arguments, and compromises led to draft documents and finally a 1992 gathering of world leaders in Rio de Janeiro—the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, dubbed the “First Earth Summit.” The great majority of countries, led by the Western Europeans, called for mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But the administration of President George H. W. Bush in the United States continued to reject any targets and timetables unless they were entirely voluntary and non-binding.+ No agreement could get far without the United States, the world’s premier political, economic and scientific power—and largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

The American administration, attacked by its closest foreign friends as an irresponsible polluter, showed some flexibility and made modest concessions. Negotiators papered over disagreements to produce a compromise (officially, the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”) which included targets for reducing emissions. It was signed at Rio by more than 150 states. The agreement’s evasions and ambiguities left governments enough loopholes so they could avoid, if they chose, serious action to reduce greenhouse gases. Few governments did more than pursue inexpensive energy efficiency initiatives, avoiding any sacrifices for the sake of the climate. But the agreement did establish some basic principles, and it pointed out a path for further negotiation.

The IPCC had established a cyclic international process. Roughly twice a decade, the IPCC would assemble the most recent research and issue a consensus statement about the prospects for climate change. That would lay a foundation for international negotiations, which would in turn give guidelines for individual national policies. Further moves would await the results of further research. In short, after governments responded to the Rio convention, it was the scientists’ turn. Although they pursued research problems as usual, published the results for their peers as usual, and discussed the technical points in meetings as usual, to officialdom this was all in preparation for the next IPCC report, scheduled for 1995.

So the experts went back to work. They pored over a great variety of evidence and calculations, but what impressed them most was one bit of new science. Critics had heaped scorn on computer models of warming, pointing out that the models calculated that greenhouse gases should have caused about 1°C of warming in the past century, which was double what had actually been seen. New runs of the models, some done especially for the IPCC, now got results quite close to the actual trend of world climate, simply by taking better account of smoke and dust pollution. The basic greenhouse effect models had not been intrinsically flawed after all. Rather, the cooling effect of pollutants produced by human activity had temporarily obscured the expected greenhouse effect warming. Temperature data from around the world increasingly matched the specific patterns predicted by calculations.+

After another arduous process of analysis, discussion, negotiation, and lobbying that involved some 400 expert scientists plus representatives of every variety of national and non-governmental interest, in 1995 the IPCC announced its conclusion to the world. While acknowledging many uncertainties, the experts found, first, that the world was certainly getting warmer. And second, that this was probably not entirely natural. The report’s single widely quoted sentence said, “The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” The weaselly wording showed the strain of political compromises that had watered down the original draft, but the message was unmistakable. “It’s official,” as Science magazine put it—the “first glimmer of greenhouse warming” had been seen.+ The conclusion was widely reported in the news media, reinvigorating public debate.+

The 1995 IPCC report estimated that a doubling of CO2, which was expected to come around the middle of the 21st century, would raise the average global temperature somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5°C. That was exactly the range of numbers announced by important groups one after another ever since 1979, when a committee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences had published 3°C plus or minus 1.5°C as a plausible guess.+ Since then computer modeling had made enormous progress, of course. The latest scenarios actually suggested a somewhat different range of possibilities, with a warming as high as 5.5°C or so. But the meaning of these numbers had been hazy from the beginning—all they represented was what a group of experts found intuitively reasonable. The scientists who wrote the 1995 IPCC report decided to stick with the familiar figures of 1.5-4.5°C, rather than give critics an opening to cry inconsistency. In fact the meaning of the numbers had invisibly changed. The experts had grown a bit more confident that the warming would in fact fall within this range. (The report did not spell out just how confident they felt, however.)+ The figures presented a striking case of an object on the border between science and politics, something that was at the same time fact and rhetoric. The IPCC process deliberately mingled science and politics until they could scarcely be disentangled.

The IPCC’s conclusions cast a long shadow over the next major conclave, the 1997 U.N. Conference on Climate Change held in Kyoto, Japan. This was a policy and media extravaganza attended by nearly 6,000 official delegates and thousands more representatives of environmental groups and industry, plus a swarm of reporters. Representatives of the United States proposed that industrial countries gradually reduce their emissions to 1990 levels. Most other governments, with Western European countries in the lead, demanded more aggressive action. Coal-rich China and most other developing countries, however, demanded exemption from the regulations until their economies caught up with the nations that had already industrialized. The greenhouse debate had now become tangled up with intractable problems involving fairness and the power relations between industrialized and developing countries. As a further impediment, the groups with the most to lose from global warming—poor people, and generations unborn—had the least power to force through an agreement. The negotiations almost broke down in frustration and exhaustion. Yet the IPCC’s conclusions could not be brushed aside. Dedicated efforts by many leaders were capped by a dramatic intervention when U.S. Vice President Al Gore flew to Kyoto on the last day and pushed through a compromise—the Kyoto Protocol. The agreement exempted poor countries for the time being, and pledged wealthy countries to cut their emissions significantly by 2010. This was only an initial experiment. It was due to end in 2012, presumably followed by a better arrangement.

Much of the world public thought the arrangement was fair. But the Global Climate Coalition, an umbrella group representing a number of American and multinational industrial corporations, organized a lobbying and public relations campaign against the Kyoto treaty in the United States, and Congress refused to take any action.+ That gave other governments an excuse to continue business as usual. Politicians could claim they advocated tough measures, casting blame on the United States for any failure to get started. Yet even if governments had taken up the Kyoto Protocol more aggressively, people on both sides of the debate agreed that it would have made only a start. It embodied so many compromises, and so many untested mechanisms for setting standards and enforcement, that the agreement could scarcely force a stabilization of emissions, let alone a reduction.

International diplomacy is a gradual process. The most important task is to shift attitudes step by step. Next comes the work, no less slow and difficult, of devising mechanisms to put decisions into practice, for example, ways to measure national emissions and processes to adjudicate quotas. The mechanisms might be hollow at the start but they could slowly become meaningful.

The Kyoto proceedings showed that the people who denied any need for action on global warming were losing credibility. No longer did financial and industrial interests present a unified opposition. The first major industry to become worried had been the insurance business. In the early 1990s it endured mammoth losses as storms and floods increased, which (perhaps coincidentally) was just what global warming theorists had predicted.+ Perhaps scientists inside industrial firms meanwhile warned their superiors that the greenhouse effect predictions really could be correct. A breakthrough came in 1997 when John Browne, chief executive of oil giant BP Amoco, declared that global warming really might come to pass, and industry should prepare to deal with it. By the end of the 1990s, several other important companies had concluded that they should acknowledge the risk, and quit the Global Climate Coalition. Some began to restructure their operations so that they could flourish in a warming world with restrictions on emissions.+

Opposition remained powerful. The world’s political system was such that people following “business as usual” did not have to prove that their practices were safe—it was up to critics to show unequivocal proof that a practice was dangerous. For a topic as complicated as climate change, people can easily find excuses to avoid altering their ways. Another layer of difficulty was added by the multitude of economic relationships and conflicts among many kinds of nations. A study of the politics concluded that “virtually no one involved in the negotiations is capable of grasping the overall picture of the climate negotiation process.” That left the experts in a “complexity trap” of scientific and legal technicalities, with no clear and simple way forward.

The difficulties overwhelmed the next major international conference, held at The Hague in late 2000. Representatives from 170 countries assembled to write the specific rules that might force reductions in greenhouse gases as promised at Kyoto. The proceedings were haunted by the third report of the IPCC (officially issued in 2001). Although the report was not yet completed, its main conclusions had been leaked to the delegates.

Again scientists had gathered in groups to sort through and debate a wide range of new scientific results, some not yet published. In the negotiations that crafted the IPCC’s third report, the consensus of scientists coelesced, answering all the objections posed by skeptics and industry lobbyists. The report bluntly concluded that the world was rapidly getting warmer. Further, strong new evidence showed that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”+ Above all, computer modeling had improved to the point where the panel could confidently conclude that future warming would be much greater still. Indeed the rate of warming was “very likely to be without precedent during at least the last 10,000 years.” Responding to criticism of earlier reports, the panel added a footnote saying just what they meant when they said the unprecedented warming was “very likely.” They said it meant they believed there was a 90-99% chance that this was true.+

The worst-case scenario supposed that global emissions of CO2 and restrictions on sulfate pollution might both rise faster than previous reports had considered. If that happened, the range of warming that the IPCC predicted for the late 21st century ran from 1.4°C up to a shocking 5.8°C (10°F).+ This range was not for the traditional doubled CO2 level, which was now expected to arrive around midcentury, but for the still higher levels that would surely come after 2070. As one prominent scientist explained, “China’s rapid industrialization has led to upward revision of predictions... While previously we thought in terms of doubling the strength of the CO2 content of the preindustrial atmosphere, current thought is moving toward a tripling.” Eventually the level would move higher still, if not halted by self-restraint or catastrophe.

The IPCC delegates could not agree on a precise statement about the probability that warming would truly fall within the range 1.4-5.8°C. But they did say it was “likely” that the warming during the next few decades would be 0.1 to 0.2°C per decade. They defined “likely” as a 66-90% chance of being true. One approach to defining the meaning of such statements was to make a wide variety of computer model runs, and see what fraction fell within the announced limits. Later findings suggested a probable upper limit even higher than the IPCC’s.

Two decades of effort had not narrowed the range of uncertainty. That was partly because the geophysics of clouds and oceans and so forth was truly intractable, with complexities and uncertainties that stubbornly refused to allow precise numerical conclusions. Experts emphasized that they could not rule out climate “surprises” outside the range of their predictions.+ They also pointed out that whether we would get small temperature increases or huge ones depended most of all on future social and economic trends—it would depend on population growth, the regulation of soot from smokestacks, and so forth. Climate researchers had finally reached a point where the biggest uncertainty about the future climate did not lie in their science, but in what humans would choose to do.+

At the conference in The Hague, continental Europeans, responsive to their powerful Green parties, insisted on a strict regime of regulation. That approach found no effective political backing in the United States, whose government insisted on market-friendly mechanisms. That meant a system of licenses which would permit a company to emit some amount of CO2 in return for absorbing an equivalent amount elsewhere, for example by preserving a forest. Europeans exclaimed that it would be unfair for the world’s biggest emitter to wriggle out of actual cutbacks. Nor could the parties agree on how to calculate an equivalence, when scientists had little solid knowledge of how forests and soils emitted or absorbed greenhouse gases.+ The negotiations collapsed. The final destruction of any chance for strong measures in the near future came in March 2001. The newly installed American President George W. Bush rejected any kind of regulation of the nation’s CO2 emissions, publicly renouncing the Kyoto Protocol.+

Yet responsible government officials and business leaders knew they could not avoid the issue. In 2000 the Economist magazine, a free-market champion, reported, “Three years ago, most business groups were rubbishing the science of global warming... Now, even business has come to realize that global warming is a problem... Rather than cheering the collapse of the negotiations in the Hague, most business lobbies chastised ministers for not concluding a deal.” Corporations needed “clear ground-rules for the green energy projects, clean-development schemes and emissions-trading initiatives on which they have been placing big bets.”

Most of the world’s governments remained committed to taking some kind of action. At an international meeting held in Bonn in July 2001, 178 governments—but not the United States—negotiated a compromise agreement for implementing the Kyoto Protocol. Their stated goal was to return greenhouse gas emissions to roughly the 1990 rate within a decade. Scarcely anyone believed the world would really achieve that. And if somehow it did happen, at the 1990 rate of emissions the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would still continue to rise. The Kyoto Protocol was evidently only a bare beginning for yet more difficult and far-reaching negotiations.

Global warming might require the international system to forge entirely new mechanisms of cooperation. Some questioned whether humanity could rise to the challenge. Most officials and many business leaders nevertheless felt it worthwhile to keep on developing regulation and monitoring mechanisms. The experience would be essential if the day came when dire need forced the world into a true commitment to halt global warming.

Far-seeing people in fields ranging from forestry to municipal water supplies had begun to lay plans for a changed world. More and more experts were confident that they could find practical ways to keep climate change within tolerable limits without harming industrial efficiency. Cutting pollution and subsidies for fossil fuels might even strengthen the economy at once, as well as for posterity. Meanwhile people could brace for the climate changes that were already inevitable.+

Climate research itself needed still more organization on a global scale. In the mid 1990s, WCRP designed a Climate Variability and Predictability project (CLIVAR) to pick up where TOGA, WOCE, and other efforts left off as they were completed. In 1995, a steering group drafted a scientific plan, and in 1998 delegates from 63 nations met in Paris to officially launch the project. In the usual fashion, the groups convened under CLIVAR could not provide any money, but simply gave their stamp of approval to research plans which then had to get funds from national governments.

The money was not easy to come by. The United States, the world's principal supporter of climate research, was not generous to science overall in the 1990s. Among other deficiencies, American computer modelers suffered from a dearth of the most advanced machines. By the end of the decade, the lead in climate simulation had passed to Europe—although science funding was tight in Europe too. Meanwhile the collapse of the Soviet Union starved important efforts like their ice-drilling station in Antarctica. (The Russians managed to complete their probe with the aid of French funds and by trading some of their ice cores for American logistical support, but the reprieve was temporary.)

Funding nevertheless improved somewhat, overall. By the 1990s, climate scientists had established that their research deserved substantial support. The ratio of funding to needs, for a science whose practical consequences would not be seen for decades, was getting close to the level of high-energy physics and cosmology, if not yet as generous as the support for biomedical research, planetary space probes, and numerous other scientific and technical problems. Far from enjoying an easy ride, scientists warned there was an actual decline of observational networks in many parts of the world. Nobody knew exactly how much was being spent on climate research (a sign of the lack of international organization) but plausible estimates put it at three or four billion dollars a year at the end of the 1990s.

Since the mid 1980s the number of scientific papers published on climate change had been doubling roughly every 11 years, to about 7000 per year in 2000 — a hundred times the number in the mid-1970s (moreover, the number of pages per article and of words per page had risen sharply). About half of these papers originated in the United States. The number of full-time climate researchers was likewise rising rapidly, reaching perhaps a thousand by the century’s end. That might sound like a lot, yet it barely sufficed for a problem where the fate of entire populations would be swayed by dozens of different factors, each planetary in scope.

Update: The European Union agreed in 2003 to roll back emissions and instituted a trading scheme. British Prime Minister Tony Blair in particular gave personal priority to rousing the international community to take action against global warming. Meanwhile the world’s second-largest reinsurance corporation, Swiss Re, voiced concern that companies could be vulnerable to lawsuits if they didn’t take action to anticipate Kyoto-Protocol restrictions on emissions. In 2004 the company warned that within a decade, insurance companies could face tens of billions of dollars a year in extra costs due to climate change accelerated by human intervention. All these European initiatives attracted scant attention in the United States.

To put the Kyoto Protocol into effect required ratification by nations with more than 55% of the world’s CO2 emissions, and with the United States refusing to join, only Russia could put the treaty into effect. After a long internal debate, in which some leading scientist-bureaucrats denied that the country should worry about global warming, the government did ratify the treaty under pressure from West Europe in October 2004. Because of the post-Soviet crash of industrial production, Russia was still well below the emissions limits the protocol required. Russian companies hoped to sell unused emissions “credits” to polluters, who might find that buying credits was cheaper than reducing their own emissions.

In December 2004 a United Nations conference on climate change gathered in Buenas Aires. But the United States government blocked efforts to begin substantive discussions on further steps to limit greenhouse emissions. The conference, which lasted weeks and involved many nations (but was scarcely noticed in the American press), ended with only a weak agreement for limited and informal talks. The Bush Administration’s adamant hostility to the Kyoto Protocol, and against any other practical steps for restraining climate change, remained one of the earliest and most sustained causes of a serious rift that observers saw growing between the United States and its European allies. The divergence on climate policy also raised strains with Japan, developing countries and others, both on the governmental level and in world public opinion. Reflecting these strains, there were signs of increasing political tensions resulting from government pressures within the IPCC itself—conflicts that we must leave to future historians to unravel.+

In February 2005 the Kyoto Protocol went into effect with 141 signatory nations. Everyone agreed that there were many problems with the treaty, and that even if all the signatory countries lived up to their obligations—which would be difficult for some—it would do little to forestall global warming. The treaty had always been acknowledged as simply a first step. The aim was to get people started on working out systems for monitoring and controlling emissions and trading emissions credits, and to stimulate the invention and development of energy-saving devices and practices. This experience would be needed for the next round of negotiations, with a new treaty anticipated when the Kyoto Protocol reached its end in 2012. Stronger measures might then be called for, if it seemed at that time that global warming would have severe consequences.

The evidence for that was stronger every year. In June 2005, the science academies of the world's leading industrial and developing countries signed an unprecedented joint statement, declaring that "the threat of climate change is real and increasing," and calling on all nations to take "prompt action." The Bush White House (together with its appointees in other agencies) was now almost the only major government entity denying the problem. At a major international meeting convened in Montreal that December to discuss how to advance beyond the Kyoto Protocol, the US representatives angered everyone by refusing to cooperate, and walked out at the eleventh hour. Coaxed back, they would agree only to to participate in discussions that would require no commitment. Nearly all the other nations settled down to serious work. They hammered out details of emissions trading mechanisms, and planned negotiations for what steps to take after the Kyoto agreement expired in 2012.

Meanwhile more and more governmental and corporate entitites, in the United States as much as elsewhere, began to seek efficient ways to limit their emissions. Faced with international regulations, threats of legal action, and stockholder or public activism, they saw they must act soon or suffer crippling economic and social consequences.

“Climatology, even by the standards of science, has been distinguished by a remarkable degree of interdisciplinary and international cooperation. As the world continues to grapple with the profound issues posed by the CO2 buildup, it could seek few better models of international cooperation than what we have already achieved.”
— E.E. David, Jr. (President, Exxon Research & Engineering Co.), 1982

What are the world’s nations doing about global warming, what can they do, and what should they do? See my Personal Note and Links

. SCEP (1970); Matthews et al. (1971); Wilson and Matthews (1971), pp. 125-29, quote on p. 129; for the history, Barrett and Landsberg (1975), pp. 16-17. BACK

16. "required:" Kellogg and Schneider (1974), p. 121; see Kellogg (1987). BACK

17. Hart and Victor (1993), p. 662; Fleagle (1994), p. 174. See UNEP's Web site. BACK

18. Robinson (1967); Fleagle (1994), pp. 170-73; GARP (1975); Perry (1975), quote p. 663. BACK

19. WMO (1975), p. ix; Perry (1975), pp. 66-67. BACK

20.Stanhill (1999), reading from graph on p. 396, see also Stanhill (2001), fig. 2, p. 518. BACK

21. Publications: Geerts, (1999), p. 64. Lamb (1997), pp. 199, 203-04. Other institutions at the time were the Institute for Environmental Studies founded in 1970 under Reid Bryson at the University of Wisconsin (incorporating a Center for Climatic Research that Bryson had created in the 1950s), and Budyko's Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad. BACK

22. Nolin (1999), p. 138. BACK

23. Greenaway (1996), p. 179, quoting F. Warner. BACK

24. Thompson et al. (2001); Jäger (1992), p. iii; Fleagle (1994), p. 176; Lanchbery and Victor (1995), p. 31. BACK

25. Bodansky (1997), quote at section 4.1.6. BACK

26. Villach: "Statement by the UNEP/WMO/ICSU International Conference," preface to Bolin et al. (1986), pp. xx-xxi; Pearce (2005). BACK

27. Agrawala (1999). BACK

28. Some elements are covered by Pomerance (1989), pp. 265-67. BACK

29. Weiner (1990), p. 79. BACK

30. Boehmer-Christiansen (1994). BACK

31. Bolin et al. (1979); Bolin (1981). BACK

32. National Academy of Sciences (1986) ; International Council of Scientific Unions (1986) ; Fleagle (1994), p. 195. BACK

33. Schneider (1987), p. 215. BACK

34. For history of the WCRP since about 1980, see this WCRP site, and for WOCE, Thompson et al. (2001). BACK

35. O'Riordan and Jäger (1996), p. 2. BACK

36. Brooks and McDonald (2000). BACK

37. Lanchbery and Victor (1995), pp. 31-32; Jäger (1992), p. v. On all this, see also O'Riordan and Jäger (1996). BACK

38. Nolin (1999) discusses the general trend of policy in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.K. 1970s-1997; for Germany, see Beuermann and Jäger (1996). BACK

39. Jones and Henderson-Sellers (1990), p. 9. BACK

40. From 76 papers in 1975 to 447 in 1997, Stanhill (1999). BACK

41. Estimate of 200 to 300: Gee (1989). The IPCC study in 1995, aiming at comprehensive international inclusion, had about 500 "authors" and over 500 "reviewers" who submitted suggestions. . BACK

42. Fleagle (1994), p. 179. BACK

43. Agrawala (1999), p. 166 (this is a particularly penetrating study). BACK

44. Weart (1998), pp. 264-65. On consensus, see p. 61. BACK

45. Miller (2001), esp. pp. 212-13. BACK

46. Chambers and Brain (2002); "circus:" McGourty (1988). BACK

47. Ungar (1995). BACK

48. The scientific conclusions were prepared by the Science Assessments Working Group, chaired (later co-chaired) by John Houghton. On the process see Houghton (1997), p. 158. BACK

49. Jäger (1992); Leggett (1999), pp. 9-28; Lanchbery and Victor (1995); Kerr (1990); IPCC (1990), see the IPCC's reports. BACK

50. Some of these polls were published only as summaries in bulletins. I have seen reports of polls by David Slade, 1989; by the "Global Environmental Change Report," vol. 2, no. 9 (11 May 1990); by Fred Singer and Jay Winston, 1991, for the Science & Environmental Policy Project; by the Gallup Organization for the Center for Science, Technology & Media, 1991; and by Thomas R. Stewart, Jeryl L. Mumpower, and Patricia Reagan-Cirincione for the Center for Policy Research of the Graduate School of Public Affairs of the State University of New York at Albany, 1991. Published surveys are Slade (1990) (esp. for degree of certainty and "surprises"); Chagnon et al. (1992); Morgan and Keith (1995) (a bit later, but particularly detailed); see also poll of a wider group of scientists, Anderson (1992). BACK

51. Mintzer and Leonard (1994). BACK

52. Kerr (1995); IPCC (1996); see also interim report, IPCC (1992); on the process Stevens (1999), ch. 13; Gelbspan (1997), ch. 5; Edwards and Schneider (2001), pp. 236-40. BACK

53. A 1995 poll of 16 top American climate scientists indicated that they felt roughly 95% certain about the ranges they proposed, which were mostly similar to the IPCC's range, although in some cases with higher upper limits. Morgan and Keith (1995), p. 470. BACK

54. van der Sluijs et al. (1998). BACK

55. Christianson (1999), pp. 254-58, 263-68; Oberthür and Ott (1999); Stevens (1999), pp. 300-07. See the U.N. Framework Convention's official Web site. For Kyoto and post-Kyoto politics (especially in Australia) see Flannery (2006), chs. 24-26. BACK

56. Leggett (1999). BACK

57. Oberthür and Ott (1999), p. 300. BACK

58. IPCC (2001), for probabilities see pp. 1, 6, 8, 13, 527. The panel did not go into the question of what a given probability range meant, but one might treat it as a Bayesian initial estimate; on the criticism, see Giles (2002). BACK

59. Broecker (1997), p. 1586. BACK

60. Knutti et al. (2002). BACK

61. Economist (2000), p. 20, see also p. 61. BACK

62. Victor (2001) is an example of searching analysis from one of the many individual viewpoints. BACK

63. Trenberth (1999). BACK

64. Warnings: IPCC (2001), p. 11. Funds: Stanhill (1999); Stanhill (2000), pp. 519-20. BACK

65. Stanhill (2000), see Stanhll, op. cit. note 20; Geerts (1999), pp. 639-40. BACK

66. Reuters, March 4, 2004; Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2003. BACK

67. Gelbspan, (2004), ch. 5; Flannery (2006), chs. 24-26. BACK

68. David (1984), p. 5. BACK