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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.)
"The climatic world is one world even if
politically we are not." Reid Bryson(1)
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At the 1945 Potsdam Conference where Allied leaders planned how
to end the Second World War, the President of the United States pressed
the dictator of the Soviet Union about weather stations. Truman was
worried about the coming American invasion of Japan. This operation,
twice the size of the June 1944 Normandy landings, would be launched
in winter. The Normandy invasion had succeeded not least because of
meteorology. The Germans had expected nothing to happen in the prevailing
bad weather, but Allied meteorologists, with better data on conditions
to westward, had spotted a break in the storms. Now Truman demanded
weather data from Siberia. Stalin grudgingly agreed to admit an American
team (before they could set up their stations, Japan surrendered).(2)
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Meteorology had become a concern at the highest levels. And as
people were learning, weather is inescapably international, flowing
each day between nations. Still, one could not expect presidents and
dictators to give sustained attention to the technicalities of weather
data. Negotiations were generally left to mid-level diplomats. They
in turn had to rely on their national meteorological experts for advice
on what should be done. To a degree not often found in international
affairs, scientists wrote the agenda for action. |
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Meteorologists of different nationalities
had long cooperated in the loose informal fashion traditional for
all scientists, reading one another's publications and visiting one
another's universities. But already for nearly a century they had
been reaching beyond that. As a leading meteorologist later remarked,
"One of the unique charms of geophysical science is its global imperative."(3)
In the second half of the 19th century, meteorologists got together
in a series of international congresses, which led to the creation
of an International Meteorological Organization. Scientists
who were interested in climate also met one another, among specialists
concerned with many other subjects of geophysical research, in an
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics which was established
in 1919. It became known as the IUGG one of the first of countless
acronyms that would infest everything geophysical and international.
Specialties relevant to climate included meteorology, oceanography,
and volcanology, each represented within the IUGG by a semi-autonomous
association. There were a number of similar unions that fostered cooperation
among national academies and scientific societies, sponsoring a variety
of committees and occasional grand international congresses, gathered
under the umbrella of the International Council of Scientific
Unions (ICSU). The IUGG, along with an association of astronomers,
was the first of these unions. For geophysicists needed international
cooperation for their research more than most other scientists did.(4) |
=>Climatologists
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The IUGG with other groups in ICSU organized sporadic programs
of coordinated observations. The leading example was an International
Polar Year (1932-33), carried out in cooperation with the International
Meteorological Organization. Scientists arranged all these matters,
involving diplomats only where absolutely necessary. |
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None of these organizations
did much to advance research on climate. Up through the mid-20th century,
climatology was mainly a study of regional phenomena. The climate
in a given region was believed to be set by the sunlight at the particular
latitude, along with the configuration of nearby mountain ranges and
ocean currents, with the rest of the planet scarcely involved. Classifying
foreign climates was useful chiefly to serve imperialist plans for
colonies advising what crops could be grown profitably in a
given region, perhaps, or what places were suitable for disease-prone
"white" settlers. However, climatology textbooks did feature diagrams
of the entire globe, divided into climate zones by temperature and
rainfall. Hopes for a fundamental science of climate pushed climatologists
toward a global perspective, as they drew on data compiled by people
of many nationalities. |
More discussion in
<=>Climatologists
<=Public opinion
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The Second World War greatly increased the demand for international
cooperation in science, and not only among military allies. For many
of those who worked for cooperation, the aim was to bind peoples together
by invoking interests that transcended the self-serving nationalism
that had brought so much horror and death. The postwar years saw the
creation of the United Nations, the Bretton-Woods financial institutions,
the first tentative steps toward European Union, and many other multilateral
efforts. When the Cold War began it only strengthened the movement,
for if tens of millions had recently been slaughtered, nuclear arms
could slay hundreds of millions. Creating areas where cooperation
could flourish seemed essential. Science, with its long tradition
of internationalism, offered some of the best opportunities. |
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Fostering transnational scientific links became an explicit policy
for many of the world's democratic governments, not least the United
States. It was not just that gathering knowledge gave a handy excuse
for creating international organizations. Beyond that, the ideals
and methods of scientists, their open communication, their reliance
on objective facts and consensus rather than command, would reinforce
the ideals and methods of democracy. As the political scientist Clark
Miller has explained, American foreign policy makers believed the
scientific enterprise was "intertwined with the pursuit of a free,
stable, and prosperous world order."(5) Scientists themselves were still more
strongly committed to the virtues of cooperation. For some, like oceanographers,
international exchanges of information were simply indispensable for
the pursuit of their studies. To many the free association of colleagues
across national boundaries meant yet more: it meant advancing the
causes of universal truth and world peace.(6) |
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Study of the global atmosphere seemed a natural place to start.
In 1947, a World Meteorological Convention, negotiated in Washington,
DC, explicitly made the meteorological enterprise an intergovernmental
affair. In 1951, the International Meteorological Organization
was succeeded by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO),
an association of national weather services. The WMO soon became an
agency of the United Nations. That gave meteorological groups access
to important organizational and financial support, and brought them
a new authority and stature. |
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We should pause a moment to recognize that
behind these bland acronyms stood real humans, crafting the organizations
and maintaining them through countless hours of delicate negotiations
and memo-writing. The WMO, for example, owed much to cooperation between
the Soviet Union's Victor A. Bugaev and Harry Wexler, chief of the
US Weather Bureau. Let us commemorate Wexler here as a particularly
outstanding example of that seldom recognized but essential figure,
the scientist-bureaucrat-administrator-diplomat (see also Bob
White). A close look reveals Wexler's hand pulling switches
behind the scenes in many parts of the story of climate science, from
the 1940s until his untimely death in 1962, as he organized research
and directed funds with judicious care.
All the organizational
work for weather prediction did little to connect the scattered
specialists in diverse fields who took an interest in climate change.
A better chance came in the mid 1950s, when a small band of scientists
(Wexler, for one) got together to push international cooperation
to a higher level in all areas of geophysics. They aimed to coordinate
their data gathering and no less important to persuade
their governments to spend an extra billion or so dollars on research.
The result was the International Geophysical Year (IGY)
of 1957-58. |
![Harry Wexler and V.A. Bugaev](images/Wexler-Bugaev1962.jpg)
Wexler &
Bugaev, 1962
from WMO's history
pages
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The IGY with its unprecedented funding was energized by a mixture
of altruistic hopes and hard practical goals.(7)
Scientists expected in the first place to advance their collective
knowledge and their individual careers. The government officials who
supplied the money, while not indifferent to pure scientific discovery,
expected the new knowledge would have civilian and military applications.
The American and Soviet governments further hoped to win practical
advantages in their Cold War competition. Under the banner of the
IGY they could collect global geophysical data of potential military
value. Along the way they could gather intelligence about their opponents,
and meanwhile enhance their nation's prestige. Others found the Cold
War an inspiration in a reverse sense, hoping that the IGY would help
set a new pattern of cooperation between the rival powers as
indeed it would. |
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The launching of the
Soviet Sputnik satellite in October 1957, and the American
space shots that followed, were officially announced as cooperative
scientific experiments under the IGY umbrella. Technically the rocket
launches had more to do with spy satellites and the threat of bombardment
with ballistic missiles. Yet on a deeper level, both global surveillance
and intercontinental warfare forced people to see the planet as a
whole. It is a moot question whether, in a more tranquil world, governments
would have spent so much to learn about sea water and air around the
globe. For whatever motives, the result was a coordinated effort involving
several thousand scientists from 67 nations. |
=>Public opinion
= Milestone
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Climate change ranked low on the
list of IGY priorities. The IGY’s official reports scarcely
noticed many meteorological subjects, for example, computer modeling.
But with such a big sum of new money, there was bound to be something
for topics that happened to be related to climate. Highly important
work was done under IGY auspices. For one thing, a young scientist
studied the level of carbon dioxide gas (CO2)
in the atmosphere, and found it was rising. Without the IGY funding,
this crucial warning signal might have been delayed a decade or more.
Meanwhile a permanent scientific presence was established in Antarctica,
and ice drilling began in Greenland, leading toward a demonstration
that ice cores held a record of the history of climate. If the first
artificial satellites were launched largely from Cold War motives,
they had a grand potential for monitoring the Earth's air and seas
in the spirit of the IGY. No less important, spending all that IGY
money pushed meteorologists, oceanographers and other Earth scientists
to coordinate their work, at both the national and international levels,
to an extent that had been sadly missing until then. The field of
geophysics rose to a new level of strength and cohesion a mature
international community. The difficulties of bringing together
the diverse topics involved in climate change are described in a supplementary
essay on Climatology as a Profession |
=>Keeling's funds
=>Climate
cycles
<=Government
<=>The ocean
=>Climatologists
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The effort still fell far short of gathering
the kind of data from around the globe that would be needed to understand
the atmosphere well. For example, even at the peak of the IGY there
was only one station reporting upper-level winds for a swath of the
South Pacific Ocean 50 degrees wide one-seventh of the Earth's
circumference.(8) The lack of data posed insuperable problems
for atmospheric scientists, in particular those who hoped to build
computer models that could show a realistic climate, or even just
predict weather a few days ahead. |
=>Models (GCMs)
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Conversations among mid-level officials, and a 1961 report from
the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, brought the problem to the
attention of the American government. A solution was at hand in the
satellites that were being launched into orbit to watch the entire
globe, but they had to be backed up by ground-level observations.
President John F. Kennedy saw an opportunity to improve his administration’s
standing with the U.S. public, who were skeptical of the value of
his ambitious plans for spacefaring. The government also had in mind
the Cold War arguments that had favored the IGY — launching
an international research program could improve the nation's prestige
abroad, and give a window into the Soviet Union's meteorological programs.
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1961, Kennedy called
for "cooperative efforts between all nations in weather prediction
and eventually in weather control." The President mentioned that
one result would be "a better understanding of the processes
that determine the system of world climate," but the primary
goal he offered was the traditional one, improved weather predictions.(9) |
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The first step would be world-wide gathering and exchange of data.
The WMO eagerly took up the proposal and promptly launched a World
Weather Watch using balloons, satellites, and so forth. The Watch
has continued down to the present as the core WMO activity. It has
served weather forecasters everywhere, scarcely impeded by the Cold
War and other international conflicts — a radiant demonstration
of how science can transcend nationalism (even when the original motives
included a strong nationalist component). Among the most important,
and most obscure, jobs of the meteorologists was to agree on standards
for exchanging data: how many times a day should a station measure
the wind, for example, and at what times, and exactly how? As historian
Paul Edwards has pointed out, "Global standards were blocked
by both perceived national interests and the sheer inertia of existing
practices." The standardization gradually achieved by the World
Weather Watch capped more than a century of difficult negotiations
and formed the essential foundation for everything that the world’s
scientists would eventually be able to say about climate change. |
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Meanwhile the ICSU,
determined not to be left out, decided to join the WMO in organizing
global meteorological research. The union of independent, mostly
academic, scientific groups and the UN-administered organization
of governmental agencies often took a different view of affairs.
Their negotiations were ponderous and sometimes frustrating. Nevertheless
in 1967 the two organizations managed to set up a Global Atmospheric
Research Program (GARP). The program's primary goal was better
weather forecasting, but the organizers, with an eye on the steadily
rising curve of atmospheric CO2, meant to study
climate too. The organization was inevitably complex. An international
committee of scientists would set policy, helped by a small full-time
planning staff in Geneva. Panels of specialists would design individual
projects, while boards of government representatives would arrange
for funding and other support. Also necessary was an additional
layer, national panels to guide the participation by each individual
nation (for the United States, the group was appointed by the National
Academy of Sciences).
Already by 1973 the observing system for GARP and the World Weather
Watch was in place — seven satellites, four of them built
by the United States and one each by the Soviet Union, the European
Space Agency, and Japan. Evidently the organizational complexities
were not a hindrance but an advantage, at least in the hands of
people who knew how to work the system (10)
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= Milestone
=>Government
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The chair
of GARP's organizing committee during its crucial formative years
1968-1971 was a Swedish meteorologist, Bert Bolin. He had started
his career with the arcane mathematics of atmospheric circulation,
working with top experts like Carl-Gustav Rossby and Jule Charney.
He won a high reputation by devising equations for weather prediction
computers, first in Princeton and then back in Stockholm. In 1957,
shortly before Rossby died unexpectedly, he encouraged Bolin to turn
to geochemistry a study whose importance had suddenly been
raised by the discovery that the greenhouse effect might become a
serious matter. Bolin went to work on carbon dioxide and became an
expert on its chemical and biological operations. He also did a bit
of pioneering work on the influence of aerosols. Yet it was less for
his wide-ranging scientific savvy that Bolin was chosen to organize
GARP, than for his unusual ability to communicate and inspire people.
Developing outstanding diplomatic skills, he would be a mainstay of
international climate organizing efforts for the next quarter-century.
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<=CO2 greenhouse
<=Biosphere
<=Aerosols
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Among Bolin's difficult tasks was getting people not only from
different countries but from different geophysics fields to find a
common language. The central activity of GARP was coordinating international
research projects, which gathered specialized sets of data on a global
scale, complementing the routine record-keeping of the World Weather
Watch. Historian Paul Edwards has pointed out that such networks of
measurement became essential in the modern world's process of "globalization."
Few recognized how powerfully these networks pressed people to communicate,
cooperate, and establish standards. |
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The process was never
straightforward, for great heaps of raw data are meaningless in themselves.
As Edwards points out, raw data must be standardized by processing
it through layers of computation. These computations are inescapably
based on particular theoretical ideas. What ultimately emerges is
a picture of "the world" as represented by a computer model. (After
all, it was mainly the computer modelers' demands for world-wide standardized
data that drove agencies to create measurement networks in the first
place.) Then, to an extent rarely noticed, the summary information
sets agendas for policy-makers. The World Weather Watch and other
meteorological programs were pioneers in the process, but during the
last quarter of the 20th century, measurement networks ranged into
many other fields of economic and social life, from trade figures
to disease statistics.(11)
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<=>Models (GCMs)
=>Modern temp's
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GARP itself, while including research on
climate, was aimed more at meteorology. Global climate, one scientist
recalled, "was considered a very subordinate field compared with synoptic
forecasting, atmospheric research, and so forth." Some even questioned
whether the WMO should continue work in climatology at all.(12) But in the late 1960s an environmental movement was everywhere
on the rise, and officials could no longer ignore global changes.
As a first step, in 1969 the WMO's Commission for Climatology established
a working group on climate forecasts. Meanwhile the WMO itself passed
a resolution calling for global monitoring of climate and atmospheric
pollutants, including CO2. Climate was also among
the many topics addressed by a Scientific Committee on Problems
of the Environment (SCOPE), established by ICSU officials in
1969 as an international framework for collecting environmental data
and for related research. The SCOPE committee, aware of the CO2
greenhouse problem, promoted the first extensive studies of how carbon
passes through bio-geochemical systems.(13) |
<=Public opinion
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Climate scientists met one another in an
increasing number of scientific meetings, from cozy workshops to swarming
conferences. The first significant conferences where scientists discussed
climate change included the topic as just one of several "Global Effects
of Environmental Pollution," to quote the title of a two-day symposium
held in Dallas, Texas in 1968. This pathbreaking symposium was followed
by a month-long "Study of Critical Environmental Problems" (SCEP)
organized at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. All
but one of the participants at MIT were residents of the United States,
and some felt that environmental issues demanded a more multinational
approach, particularly to meet the need for standardized global research
programs. This led directly to a second, more comprehensive gathering
of experts from 14 nations in Stockholm in 1971, funded by an assortment
of private and government sources. The Stockholm meeting focused specifically
on climate change a "Study of Man's Impact on Climate" (SMIC).(14) |
<=>Public opinion
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The exhaustive SMIC discussions
failed to work out a consensus among scientists who felt greenhouse
gases were warming the Earth and those who felt pollution from particles
was cooling it. Nevertheless, all agreed in issuing a report with
stern warnings about the risk of severe climate change. Among other
things, the reviewers noted the possibility that warming would melt
polar ice, which would reduce the Earth's reflection of sunlight and
thus accelerate the warming. With such unstable feedbacks at work,
the climate could shift dangerously "in the next hundred years," the
scientists declared, and "as a result of man's activities."(15)
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<=Simple models
=>Public
opinion
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What should be done? Like almost all scientists at
the time, the SMIC experts called mainly for more research, to determine
how serious the problem really was. They recommended a major international
program to monitor the environment, much larger and better integrated
than the scattered efforts of the time, as well as more research with
computer models and so forth. |
= Milestone <=>Public opinion
=>Models
(GCMs) =>Government |
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The SMIC meeting had been organized specifically
to prepare for a pioneering United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment that was held the following year, again in Stockholm.
The SMIC Report was "required reading" for the delegates.(16) Heeding the report's recommendations,
along with voices from many directions calling attention to other
problems, the U.N. conference set in motion a vigorous new United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). From this point forward,
gathering data and other research on the climate was a concern
although only one among many of the U.N.'s environmental activities.(17) |
=>Keeling's funds
|
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Meanwhile the GARP committee set up a series of internationally coordinated
large-scale observations of the oceans and atmosphere. As usual the
main goal was improved short-term weather prediction, but as usual
the findings could also be useful for climate studies. The best-known
of these projects was the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE,
an acronym containing an acronym!). The aim of the exercise was to
understand the enormous transport of moisture and heat from tropical
oceans into the atmosphere where cumulus clouds formed. As one participant
boasted, GATE was "the largest and most complex international scientific
undertaking yet attempted." In the summer of 1974, a dozen aircraft
and 40 research ships from 20 nations made measurements across a large
swath of the tropical Atlantic Ocean, along with a satellite launched
specially to linger overhead.(18) Increasingly in such studies, not only
would one find teams from different nations cooperating, but also
the individual members within a single team might come from a half
dozen different nations. (See also the American Meteorological
Society's GATE history site. For
glimpses into the challenging inner workings of international cooperation,
see the reminiscences and documents on the experimental Greenland
Ice Drilling site.) |
=>Aerosols
<=>Climatologists
<=>Rapid change |
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While these studies proceeded through the
early 1970s, the world public's climate anxieties were jumping higher
as savage droughts and other weather disasters struck several important
regions. The Secretary-General of the WMO took note of "the many references
to the possible impacts of climatic changes on world food production
and other human activities at various international meetings," including
both a special session of the U.N. General Assembly and a World Food
Conference in 1974. The WMO resolved to take the lead in this newly
prominent field, organizing an increased number of conferences and
working groups on climate change. GARP planners too decided to give
additional stress to climate research, making what one leader called
a "belated, though earnest and sincere" effort to bring in oceanographers
and polar researchers.(19) |
<=Public opinion |
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Nevertheless, the study of long-term climate change remained a
relatively minor topic, even while studies of short-term weather flourished.
A rapid rise in publications on climate change had begun in the1950s.
That did not mean much, for the starting level had been negligibly
small. In 1975, only about 75 scientific papers were published world-wide
on any aspect of the subject, and the rate of increase was sluggish
compared with "hot" fields of science.(20) (Some of these papers, however, presented
important scientific advances.) |
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Despite growing public and scientific interest in climate change,
the funding for research on the topic was now generally static in
every country. The number of PhD's granted in the sciences of the
Earth, oceans and atmosphere, which had grown rapidly until the mid
1970s, levelled off. The same thing was happening in most fields of
science during the economically stagnant 1970s. But climate science
had special problems because it lacked a committed sponsor. Funding
was dispersed among numerous private organizations and relatively
small and weak government agencies. An example of the problems was
the struggle to sustain a Climatic Research Unit that Hubert H. Lamb
established in 1971 at the University of East Anglia in England. One
of a very few institutions dedicated to climate research, the Unit
would make pathbreaking studies of climate history, but its funding
from the government was trifling. Only a scramble to secure grants
from various private foundations allowed the work to move forward.(21*) |
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Climate scientists had
little chance to get access to policy-makers. If they convinced their
contacts among lower-level officials that climate change posed a problem,
these officials themselves had scant influence with the higher reaches
of their governments. The best opportunities lay elsewhere. As one
scholar commented, "national research had in many countries a better
chance of influencing international policy than domestic policy."(22)
By the mid 1970s, when science officials in various countries became
so concerned about climate change that they began to contemplate policy
actions, they found sympathetic ears among officials in United Nations
organizations. One notable example was Robert M. White, who in his
position as head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, and afterward of the
agency responsible for all government meteorology and oceanography
(NOAA), was his nation's official representative to the WMO. Already
in the early 1960s, Bob White had been one of the founders of the
World Weather Watch. Now in all his official capacities he pressed
for cooperative research on climate change, using American government
commitments to influence WMO and vice versa. |
<=Public
opinion
<=>Government |
|
Scientists' demands for action led to a 1978 International Workshop
on Climate Issues, held under WMO and ICSU auspices in Vienna, where
the participants organized a pioneering World Climate Conference.
Their mode of organization was crucial, setting a standard for many
later efforts. Participation was by invitation, mostly scientists
and some government officials. Well in advance, the conference organizers
commissioned a set of review papers inspecting the state of climate
science. These were circulated, discussed, and revised. Then more
than 300 experts from more than 50 countries convened in Geneva in
1979 to examine the review papers and recommend conclusions. The experts'
views about what might happen to the climate spanned a broad spectrum,
yet they managed to reach a consensus. In a concluding statement,
the conference recognized a "clear possibility" that an increase of
CO2 "may result in significant and possibly major
long-term changes of the global-scale climate." This cautious statement
about an eventual "possibility" was scarcely news, and it caught little
attention. |
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Conferences and other international bodies
shied away from any statement that might seem partisan. Scientific
societies since their outset (that is, since the foundation of the
Royal Society of London in the 17th century) had explicitly held themselves
apart from politics. This tradition was doubly strong in international
science associations, which could not hope to keep cooperation going
if they published anything but facts that all agreed upon. Every word
of key statements was negotiated, sometimes at great length. When
journalists at a press conference asked a leader of SCOPE what he
thought governments should do, he replied, "They should read the report."
When the journalists said, "Okay, but what next?" he replied, "They
should read it again."(23) |
<=>Public opinion
|
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The most influential work of those who attended the 1978 Vienna conference
was structural. Besides organizing the 1979 Geneva meeting, they called
for a climate program established in its own right, to replace the
miscellaneous collection of uncoordinated "meteorological" studies.
The government representatives in the WMO and the scientific leaders
in ICSU took the advice, and in 1979 launched a World Climate
Programme (WCP) with various branches. These branches included
groups that coordinated routine global data-gathering, plus a World
Climate Research Programme (WCRP). The WCRP was the successor
to the portion of GARP that had been concerned with climate change.
It inherited the GARP organization and logistics, including WMO administrative
support plus its own small staff, and an independent scientific planning
committee.(24) As in GARP, the new organization's
main task was planning complex international research projects. For
example, under WCRP an International Satellite Cloud Climatology
Project collected streams of raw data from the weather satellites
of several nations, channeling the data through a variety of government
and university groups for processing and analysis. The vast data sets
were stored in a central archives, managed by a U.S. government agency.
|
= Milestone
=>Government
=>Solar
variation
|
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The driving force behind all this, as one observer remarked, was
"a small group of 'entrepreneurs,' who promoted what they viewed as
global rather than national interests." Blurring the distinction between
government officials and non-governmental actors, they organized a
series of quasi-official international meetings which were increasingly
influential.(25) Some of the meetings were formally
sponsored by the WMO, others by ICSU or UNEP. |
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The most important initiative was was a series
of invitational meetings for meteorologists held at Villach, Austria,
beginning in 1980. It was sponsored by all three organizations, with
particular impetus from UNEP's influential director, Mostafa Tolba.
The 1985 Villach conference was a major turning point. The assembled
experts reviewed new evidence (supercomputer models, the discovery
that CO2 levels had plunged during past ice
ages, a global temperature rise, and so forth), and managed to reach
an international consensus. Greenhouse gases could warm the Earth
by several degrees, they agreed — and soon. "Suddenly the
climate change issue became much more urgent," recalled Bolin,
who supervised the meeting's scientific report.
In their concluding statement, the Villach group boldly announced
that "in the first half of the next century a rise of global
mean temperature could occur which is greater than any in man's
history." As usual, the scientists called for more research.
But they also took a more activist stance than scientists had normally
taken. Brought together as individual researchers with no official
governmental responsibilities, they felt free to respond to the
alarming conclusions that emerged from their discussions. The Villach
report warned that "the rate and degree of future warming could
be profoundly affected by governmental policies," and told
governments they must consider taking real action.(26)
|
<=CO2 greenhouse
<=Models
(GCMs)
<=Modern temp's
= Milestone |
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As a practical result of the Villach recommendations, in 1986 the
WMO, UNEP, and ICSU jointly established an Advisory Group on Greenhouse
Gases (AGGG). It was a small, elite committee of experts. For
funding and advice, it relied largely on scientists and institutions
that were already advocating policies to restrain climate change.
The AGGG organized international workshops and promoted studies, aiming
eventually to stimulate further world conferences.(27)
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These U.N.-sponsored efforts were only one strand, although the
central one, in a tangle of national, bilateral, and multi-national
initiatives.(28) Countless organizations were now seeking to be part of
the action. Of course, none of this work was actually done by abstract
"organizations." It was made to happen by a few human beings. Among
these Bert Bolin was the indispensable man, chairing meetings, editing
reports, promoting the establishment of panels. Along with his exceptional
personal abilities as a scientist, executive, and diplomat, Bolin
benefitted from his position at the University of Stockholm in Sweden,
traditionally neutral territory. |
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|
Villach and other world conferences, along with similar consensus-building
studies on climate change carried out in the 1980s by national bodies
such as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, crystallized a set
of beliefs and attitudes among climate scientists. Science writer
Jonathan Weiner reported after a series of interviews, "By the second
half of the 1980s, many experts were frantic to persuade the world
of what was about to happen. Yet they could not afford to sound frantic,
or they would lose credibility." Any push for policy changes set the
scientists against potent economic and political forces, and also
against some colleagues who vehemently denied the likelihood of global
warming. The scientific arguments became entangled with emotions.
"They were so worried about the changes they saw coming, and the difficulty
of persuading the world," Weiner noticed, "that they sometimes caught
themselves rooting for the changes to appear... it was hard to know
how to feel."(29) |
|
|
Human motivation is
never simple, and behind the emotional commitment of scientists lay
more than dry evaluation of data. Adding to their concern about global
warming was the normal desire of people to perceive their own field
as vitally important, with the corollary that funds should be generously
awarded for their work and for their students and colleagues. An important
minority took their case directly to the public, but most scientists
felt more comfortable sending rational appeals through channels to
government officials. The scientists found allies among administrators
in national and international bureaucracies, persuading many that
the world faced a serious problem. That reinforced the normal inclination
of officials to extol the importance of their areas of responsibility
and to seek greater budgets and broader powers. Whenever evidence
suggests that something needs to be done, those who stand to profit
from the doing will be especially quick to accept the evidence and
to argue for policy changes. As the political scientist Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen
argues, "Calls for environmental regulation were generally attractive
to environmental bureaucracies," and attention to global warming "allowed
national bodies to expand their influence." As for politicians, by
speaking to public concerns for the environment they could mount "a
world stage on which to indulge in global green rhetoric."(30) |
=>Public opinion
<=>Government
|
|
To sort through the human motives and determine what policy actions
were truly needed, the only reliable guide would be rigorous scientific
conclusions—which would require more research. While a few scientists
and officials tentatively proposed policy changes, many more were
pushing for better international research projects. Although ICSU's
SCOPE program had produced some useful work, such as reports on the
global carbon cycle, that was barely a beginning.(31) The WCRP's work was likewise useful,
but as an organization under the supervision of the WMO (which is
to say, the heads of national weather services), the WCRP was naturally
preoccupied with meteorology. All this was too narrow for the scientists
who were taking up the new "climate system" approach, which was building
connections among geophysics, chemistry, and biology. They decided
they needed a new administrative body. |
|
|
Spurred especially by U.S. scientists acting
through their National Academy of Sciences, around 1983 various organizations
came together under ICSU to develop an International Geosphere-Biosphere
Program (IGBP). Starting up in 1986, the IGBP built its own large
structure of committees, panels, and working groups.(32) The drawback, as one climate scientist
pointed out, was a feeling that "an IGBP should be in the business
of measuring or modeling everything at once from the mantle of the
Earth to the center of the Sun!"(33) |
<=>Climatologists
|
|
The WCRP remained active in its sphere, launching international
collaborations in meteorology and related oceanography. Like the IGBP
and other international scientific programs, the WCRP had no significant
funds of its own. It was a locus of panels, workshops, draft reports,
and above all negotiations. Scientists would hammer out an agreement
on the research topics that should get the most attention over the
next five or ten years, and who should study which problem in collaboration
with whom. The scientists would then go back to their respective governments,
backed by the international consensus, to beg for funds for the specific
projects. |
|
|
In each case one of the organizers' first
difficulties was to find a meaningful and pronounceable acronym
a mode of naming emblematic of organizations with distinct if transient
identities, stuck together from independent components. Important
examples of projects that gathered data internationally under the
WCRP were the Tropical Ocean and Global Atmosphere Programme
(TOGA), the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), and
the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS, which surveyed
the carbon in the world's oceans). Scheduled to run through the mid
1990s, these were complex institutions, coordinating the work of hundreds
of scientists and support staff from a variety of institutions in
dozens of nations.(34) |
<=>The oceans
|
|
Two participants described the developments of the 1980s as a "revolution"
in the social structure of climate science. The field was propelled
to a new level not only by great improvements in scientific tools
such as computers, but equally by great improvements in international
networking thanks to cheap air travel and telecommunications. "Huge
teams of highly skilled people can review each other's work, perform
integrated assessments, and generate ideas" far better than the mostly
isolated individuals of earlier decades, they pointed out. "A steady
diet of fresh scientific perspectives helps to maintain regular doses
of funding, helped in turn by an endless round of conferences."(35) |
|
|
Research impelled a major policy breakthrough in the late
1980s, although not for climate. International public concern over
damage to the protective stratospheric ozone layer, and scientific
work coordinated by UNEP, led to policy discussions beginning in 1982.
The result was a Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone
Layer, signed by 20 nations in 1985. This document was only a toothless
expression of hopes, but it established a framework. The framework
became useful when the discovery of an "ozone hole" over Antarctica
shocked officials and the public, showing that the problem was already
upon us. In the epochal 1987 Montreal Protocol of the Vienna Convention,
governments formally pledged to restrict emission of specific ozone-damaging
chemicals. |
=>Government <=>Public opinion <=>Other gases
= Milestone |
|
This was not the first international agreement
to restrict pollution in response to scientific advice. One notable
example was an Antarctic Treaty, regulating activities on the polar
continent, inspired by the IGY and signed back in 1959. More to the
point, in 1979 the nations of Western Europe had adopted a Convention
on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution. This pledged them to limit
their sulfate emissions, which scientists had proved was the cause
of destructive acid rain. The aim was to restrain coal burning in,
say, Britain so it would not kill forests in, say, Germany. Later,
more nations and other chemicals were added to the agreement. The
convention led to the establishment of an international scientific
project to study the problem, complete with elaborate computer modeling
to connect acid rain with economic scenarios for power generation.(36)
|
<=Public opinion
|
|
The Montreal Protocol set an even higher and stricter standard
for international cooperation and national self-restraint. Over the
following decade it had wonderful success in reducing emissions of
CFCs, staving off further deterioration of the ozone layer. Although
important for protecting human health and vital ecosystems, this did
little to hinder climate change. (CFCs are only one of many greenhouse
gases, and some of the chemicals that industry substituted for CFCs
were themselves greenhouse gases). However, the people who had begun
to worry about global warming hoped that the precedent set by the
Montreal Protocol could set an example for negotiations to restrict
greenhouse gase emissions. Industrial groups and ideologues had vehemently
opposed this sort of regulation as an insufferable economic drag.
But in regulating CFCs, as in regulating the sulfate emissions that
caused acid rain and in a variety of other environmental issues, a
few years of experience showed that market-oriented mechanisms could
be devised to do the job surprisingly cheaply. Indeed, over the long
run the restrictions brought a net savings to the global
economy. |
|
|
The success at Montreal was followed up the
next year, 1988, in a "World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere:
Implications for Global Security," nicknamed the Toronto Conference.
The planning came out of the workshops initiated by the 1985 Villach
conference. Toronto was a meeting by invitation of scientist experts
not official government representatives, who would have had
a much harder time reaching a consensus. The Toronto Conference's
report concluded that the changes in the atmosphere due to human pollution
"represent a major threat to international security and are already
having harmful consequences over many parts of the globe." For the
first time, a group of prestigious scientists called on the world's
governments to set strict, specific targets for reducing greenhouse
gas emissions. That was the Montreal Protocol model: set targets internationally,
and let governments come up with their own policies to meet the targets.
By 2005, said the experts, the world should push its emissions some
20% below the 1988 level.(37) |
= Milestone
|
|
The Toronto Conference
attracted much publicity, and politicians at the highest level began
to pay attention to greenhouse gases. It helped that the Conference
was held during the summer of 1988, when exceptional heat and drought
caused much public concern in the United States the nation
whose cooperation was indispensable for any effective agreement. But
officials were also impressed by the insistent warnings of leading
scientists. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
— trained as a chemist and one of the few prominent politicians
able to fully understand her briefings by scientists — gave
global warming official standing when she described it as a key issue
in a September 1988 speech to the Royal Society. She showed she meant
it by increasing the funding for climate research (although as elsewhere,
most of the money was relabelled or taken from other programs). Thatcher
was the first major world leader to take a determined position. Attention
from the politically powerful "Greens" in Germany and elsewhere in
continental Europe added to the issue's legitimacy.(38) Meanwhile, the media increasingly hinted
that any catastrophe in the news, from droughts to floods to polluted
seas, might be due to human interference with climate. What had begun
as a research puzzle had become a serious international public concern
and a diplomatic issue. |
<=>Public opinion
<=Public
opinion
|
|
The policy debates required answers to questions
even more intractable than the scientific ones. What would global
warming mean for the economy and for society, and what should (or
could) governments do about it? These questions pushed climate scientists
toward what some called a "holistic" approach, interacting
with many other fields.(39) Experts in agriculture, economics,
and so forth began to build rough numerical models, addressing questions
such as how farming and forestry would react to a rise of temperature
or to a rise of fuel taxes. Predictions would also have to figure
in possible increases in weather disasters, in tropical diseases,
and much else. The results of the studies were far from reassuring.
|
<=>Simple models
|
|
The steep climb of concern in scientific,
public, and official circles did not translate into any exceptional
increase of funding in the 1980s. Particularly in the United States,
the world's largest source of money for research, the Reagan administration
instinctively disbelieved all claims supported by environmentalists.
Moreover, during the 1980s most of the industrialized countries, from
the United States through Western Europe to the Soviet Union, slowed
the rate of increase of their research spending. With jobs in research
scarcer than applicants, students were not attracted to the grueling
labor of winning a Ph.D. Nevertheless, climate change managed to attract
an increasing number of students and grants, rising at least as rapidly
as other important fields of science in the 1980s. After stalling
in 1970-1975 the annual number of scientific papers published on climate
change world-wide began again to rise in a fairly smooth exponential,
more than doubling each decade.(40) |
<=Government
|
|
Climate research remained quite a small field of science in the
1980s. Whereas any substantial sub-field of physics or chemistry counted
its professionals in the thousands, the number of scientists dedicated
full-time to research on the geophysics of climate change was probably
only a few hundred worldwide. (If you included every scientist competent
to at least comment on some aspect, including such fields as biological
responses to climate change, it would still be not much above a thousand.)(41)
Since these climate scientists were divided among a great variety
of fields, any given subject could muster only a handful of true experts.
|
|
|
What role could the international climate science community, so
small and fragmented, play among the mighty political and economic
forces that were coming to bear on climate policy? The existing scientific
organizations, however well-crafted to coordinate research projects,
seemed incapable of taking a stand in policy debates. As one knowledgeable
observer put it, "Because WCRP was seen as largely the vehicle of
physical scientists, while IGBP was viewed largely as the vehicle
of scientists active in biogeochemical cycles, and because both WCRP
and IGBP were seen as scientific research programs, neither seemed
to afford the venue that could generate the necessary confidence in
the scientific and policy communities."(42) Events like the Toronto Conference
were all very well, but a report issued after a brief meeting could
not command much respect. And it did not commit any particular group
to following up systematically. |
|
|
The Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases (AGGG) set up in 1986 had
served well in keeping the issue in the forefront through activities
like the Toronto Conference. However, the group lacked the official
status and connections that could give their recommendations force.
Besides, they had little money to spend on studies. The AGGG's reliance
on a few private foundations, and its connections with outspoken environmentalists,
raised suspicions that the group's recommendations were partisan.
An even more fundamental drawback was the group's structure, in the
traditional model of a tight, elite committee. As one policy expert
explained, "climate change spans an enormous array of disciplines,
each with their own competing schools of thought... Seven experts,
even with impeccable credentials,... could not credibly serve as mouthpieces
of all these communities."(43) |
|
|
Policy-makers concerned about climate looked
for a way to supersede the AGGG with a new kind of institution. Conservatives
in the United States administration might have been expected to oppose
the creation of a new and prestigious body to address climate change.
But they feared still more the strong environmentalist pronouncements
that the independent scientists of the AGGG were likely to stimulate.
Better to form a new group under the control of government representatives.
|
<=Government |
|
Responding to all these pressures, in 1988
the WMO and UNEP collaborated in creating an Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Unlike earlier conferences, national
academy panels, and advisory committees, the IPCC was composed mainly
of people who participated not only as science experts, but as official
representatives of their governments people who had strong
links to national laboratories, meteorological offices, and science
agencies like NASA. The IPCC was neither a strictly scientific nor
a strictly political body, but a unique hybrid. This met the divergent
needs of a variety of groups, especially within the United States
government, which was a prime stimulator for the action. The AGGG
was not formally abolished. But within two years this small body ceased
to meet, as most of the world's climate scientists were drawn into
the IPCC's processes. The panel would fulfill its creators' hopes,
becoming a pivotal player in policy debates. |
= Milestone |
|
Most people were scarcely aware that these international initiatives
all relied on a key historical development the world-wide advance
of democracy. It is too easy to overlook the obvious fact that international
organizations govern themselves in a democratic fashion, with vigorous
free debate and votes in councils. Often, as in the IPCC, decisions
are made by a negotiated consensus in a spirit of equality, mutual
accommodation, and commitment to the community process (these are
seldom celebrated but essential components of the democratic political
culture). If we tried to make a diagram of the organizations that
deal with climate change, we would not draw an authoritarian tree
of hierarchical command, but a spaghetti tangle of cross-linked, quasi-independent
committees. |
|
|
It is an important but little-known rule that such organizations
were created mainly by governments that felt comfortable with such
mechanisms at home, that is, democratic governments. Nations like
Nazi Germany, Communist China, and the former Soviet Union did little
to create international organizations (aside from front groups under
their own thumb), and participated in them awkwardly. Happily, the
number of nations under democratic governance increased dramatically
during the 20th century, and by the end of the century they were predominant.
Therefore democratically based international institutions proliferated,
exerting an ever stronger influence in world affairs.(44) This was visible in all areas of human endeavor, but it
often came first in science, internationally minded since its origins.
The democratization of international politics was the scarcely noticed
foundation upon which the IPCC and its fellow organizations took their
stand. |
|
|
It worked both ways. The international organization of climate
studies helped fulfill some of the hopes of those who, in the aftermath
of the Second World War, had worked to build an open and cooperative
world order. If the IPCC was the outstanding example, in other areas,
ranging from disease control to fisheries, panels of scientists were
becoming a new voice in world affairs.(45) Independent of nationalities, they
wielded increasing power by claiming dominion over views about the
actual state of the world shaping perceptions of reality itself.
Such a transnational scientific influence on policy matched dreams
held by liberals since the nineteenth century. It awoke corresponding
suspicions in the enemies of liberalism. |
|
|
After 1988 |
=>after88 |
|
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.(46) |
<=>Public opinion
|
|
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.(47) |
|
|
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. |
Bert Bolin on
television, 1997.
Courtesy STV |
|
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.(48*) |
|
|
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. |
<=Sea rise & ice |
|
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.(49)
|
= Milestone
<=Models (GCMs)
=>Government
=>Solar variation
=>Other
gases |
|
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.(50) |
=>Public opinion
|
|
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. |
= Milestone
<=Government |
|
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.(51) |
|
|
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. |
<=Models (GCMs)
<=Modern
temp's
|
|
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.(52) The conclusion was widely reported in the news media, reinvigorating
public debate. |
= Milestone
=>Rapid change
=>Public
opinion
<=>Modern
temp's
|
|
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.)(53*)
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.(54) The IPCC process deliberately mingled science and politics
until they could scarcely be disentangled. |
<=Models (GCMs)
<=Models
(GCMs)
|
|
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. |
= Milestone |
|
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.(55)
|
<=Government
<=>Public opinion |
|
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, seveal 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.(56) |
<=Simple models
<=>Public opinion
|
|
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.(57) |
|
|
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, a 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.(58*) |
<=Modern temp's
= Milestone
=>A
personal note
|
|
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."(59) Eventually
the level would move higher still, if not halted by self-restraint
or catastrophe. |
<=Aerosols |
|
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.(60)
|
|
|
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.
|
<=Rapid change
=>Public
opinion |
|
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. |
<=Biosphere
<=Government |
|
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."(61) |
|
|
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.
|
= Milestone |
|
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.(62) |
|
|
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. |
=>Public opinion
|
|
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.(63)
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.) |
<=Models
(GCMs) |
|
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(64)
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 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.
(65) |
|
|
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.(66)
All these European initiatives attracted scant attention in the United
States. |
<=>Public
opinion |
|
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.(67)
|
|
|
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. |
= Milestone |
|
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.
|
<=>Government |
|
"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(68)
|
|
|
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. |
|
|
|
RELATED:
Home
U.S. Government: The View from Washington
The Public and Climate
The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect
Supplement:
Climatology as a Profession
1. Bryson testimony, May 26, 1976 United States Congress (95:1) (1977), p. 217.
BACK
2. Yoder (1997).
BACK
3. Smagorinsky (1970), p. 25.
BACK
4. Greenaway (1996), p. 48 and
passim.
BACK
5. Miller (2001), p. 171 and
passim.
BACK
6. See e.g., Hamblin (2002), p.
14.
BACK
7. Standard although superficial accounts are Chapman (1959); Sullivan (1961);
Greenaway (1996), ch. 12.
BACK
8. Lorenz (1967), pp. 26, 33,
90-91, ch. 5 passim.
BACK
9. Kristine Harper as quoted in Doel
(2002); Harlan Cleveland, "Keeping Up with Technology," Address to
National GeoData Forum, Nov. 2, 2001, accessed at http://www.chaordic.org/res_geodata.html
3/06 but no longer online. Kennedy, address before the General Assembly
of the United Nations, September 25, 1961, online here.
Thanks to Bob Henson for correcting this reference. BACK
10. Standards: Edwards, (2004).
Fleagle (2001), pp. 57, 97; Perry
(1975), p. 661; Conway (in press).
BACK
11. Edwards (2000).
BACK
12. Taba (1991), p. 106.
BACK
13. Greenaway (1996), pp.
176-82.
BACK
14. Singer (1970) for Dallas
1968; Barrett and Landsberg (1975), p. 16; SCEP (1970).
BACK
15. 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
copyright
© 2003-2006 Spencer Weart & American Institute of Physics
|