Adjectives

<=Modern temp's 

  

= Milestone 

 

   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 

  

=>Impacts

   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 European representatives placated their powerful Green parties by insisting on a strict regime of regulation. That approach found no effective political backing in the United States and a few other nations, which insisted on market-friendly mechanisms. That would be a system of licenses to permit a company to emit some amount of CO2 in exchange for removing an equivalent amount of emissions elsewhere, for example by saving a forest from destruction. Europeans exclaimed that it would be unfair for the world's biggest emitters 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 amid acrimony.(60a)  

   

  
 
 

<=Biosphere

<=Government

  

Hopes for strong measures in the near future were entirely crushed 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. Moreover, the U.S. administration, suspecting that Watson's environmentalism had biased the panel's reports, insisted that he be denied another term as chair of the IPCC. Watson's hard-driving, forthright ways had ruffled many feathers, leaving him vulnerable. The majority of delegates, particularly from developing countries, voted for Rajendra Pachauri, a mild-mannered economist from India.(61)  

 

Rajendra Pachauri 

       Yet whatever happened to the IPCC, many responsible government officials and business leaders saw that 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."(61a)  

  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 negotiated a compromise agreement for implementing the Kyoto Protocol. What made this breakthrough possible was at the same time the agreement's greatest flaw, the absence of the U.S. government from the entire process. The stated goal of the remaining nations 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) 

  In 2003  the European Union agreed 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 scientist-bureaucrats denied that their frigid country needed to worry about global warming), the government did ratify the treaty under pressure from Western 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 its general rejection of any restraint on industry for the sake of avoiding climate change, was one of the first and most persistent causes of a serious rift between the United States and its European allies. The divergence on climate policy also raised strains with Japan and vulnerable developing countries, both on the governmental level and in world public opinion (by 2006, polls were showing that the climate issue aroused world-wide hostility against the United States). Reflecting these strains, there were signs of 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 American 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. In January 2005 Europeans adopted a scheme that required permits for carbon emissions, and set up a market for trading the permits. The system was so badly designed that the price of the permits soared to about 30 euros ($40) per ton of carbon and then abruptly crashed to almost nil. Meanwhile permits for emissions after 2007, when the regime was expected to tighten, recovered and climbed past 20. A parallel, non-obligatory carbon exchange in the United States set the price at about $4 per ton. In a perverse way these anomalies were exactly what the Kyoto negotiators had wanted, that is, experiments to find how particular policies worked in practice. The lessons they taught would guide the more rigorous policies that governments would need to shape.(68*)  

  

In the first months of 2007, the IPCC issued its Fourth Assessment Report (FAR). Most of the world's climate scientists had taken a hand in shaping the conclusions. In two rounds of review, what one of the participants called “a painstaking process of self-interrogation,” the editors had individually considered more than 30,000 comments. The effort meant serious sacrifices. Scientists had to set aside their chosen profession of pushing into the unknown, in order to work out what they could agree was known. “It drives you absolutely crazy,” one of them said. “You fly to distant places; you stay up all night negotiating; you listen to hundreds of sometimes silly interventions. You go through so many mundane things to produce the big picture.”(68a)  

 

  Computer modellers in particular had devoted much of their work for half a dozen years to producing results specifically tailored for the IPCC report. Different models still gave somewhat different results, for much remained unknown about complex processes such as the effects of aerosols in forming clouds. But the biggest source of uncertainty was human: what economic and political scenario would the world adopt for increasing or restraining its greenhouse gas emissions? Teams ran their models through a set of scenarios that described a range of future world emission rates — just one of the areas where the research effort was increasingly structured by the IPCC process itself.   

<=Models (GCMs)  

  

  
 

<=Simple models 

 

  

Pachauri, the American government's choice for IPCC chair, had become as worried about global warming as the scientists, and his shy manner concealed a passionate energy. Under his skillful chairmanship the panel reached a consensus that was tighter and more dire than ever. The range of temperatures the modelers predicted for the end of the century had not changed much since the 2001 report. Their best guess was still roughly 3°C of warming. They had grown more certain that we were very unlikely to get away with a rise of less than 1.5°C. The computer models did not agree so well on the upper limit — there was a small but all too real possibility that global temperature could soar to a disastrous 6°C or even higher. Indeed that would be a big possibility if, contrary to the IPCC's baseline assumption, the world continued with business as usual instead of severely restraining its emissions. Whatever happened in the 21st century, the following century would be warmer still.  

  
 

Scientists at IPCC meeting

  

Scientists did feel much more certain about a couple of things. First, serious effects of global warming were now plainly evident. Around the world they were seeing greater heat waves, more stormy rains and droughts, melting of ice and permafrost, and changes in the ranges of countless animal and plant species.And second, it was nearly certain that human emissions were partly responsible for these ever worse changes.(69) 

  

= Milestone 

=>Public opinion

  

Ominous though that was, observers increasingly remarked that the statements could have been even stronger. The IPCC process by its very nature muffled the experts, whether a minority or even a majority, who worried about eventualities that were uncertain but potentially catastrophic. For example, plausible speculations that ice sheets could surge rapidly into the oceans were omitted from the official conclusions about sea level rise. Indeed since 1990 the climb in both sea level and temperature had been at about the upper limit of what previous IPCC reports had seen as likely. Conventionally one would say the IPCC had been soberly conservative by refusing to emphasize the more extreme possible changes. But if being conservative means concentrating on the most serious risks (as people do, for example, when budgeting for military forces), a band of projections that was overall too low had been the reverse of conservative. 

  

  

<=Sea rise & ice 

  

  

  

<=>Impacts

  

What if the world warmed up even more than 6°C? After all, the IPCC was not entirely confident that it could not, even under the baseline scenario of gradually imposed controls on emissions. Or what if, as some experts warned, even a 3°C rise could leave us with a radically "different planet"? As one geophysicist wrote in an open letter to his colleagues, "Up until now many scientists may have consciously or unconsciously downplayed the more extreme possiblilities at the high end of the uncertainty range, in an attempt to appear moderate and 'responsible' (that is, to avoid scaring people). However, true responsibility is to provide evidence of what must be avoided."(69a) 

 

  

Alarming statements were still more repressed in the exhausting plenary session where political appointees revised the crucial "Summary Report for Policymakers" until they all could endorse it. Journalists reported that the delegation from the United States, while conservative in the conventional sense, played a more constructive role than in previous IPCC meetings. The most strenuous obstruction came from the Saudi Arabians, who now as in the past represented the interests of all who wished to sell fossil fuels without restraint, and from the Chinese, representing nations that hoped to burn ever more fuel as their industries grew.  

  

An example was a long debate over how certain scientists could be that humanity was causing the observed warming. The British delegation, supported by many scientists, insisted this was "extremely likely" (that is, at least 99% certain), but in the end the delegates could only agree to report that it was "very likely" (that is, between 90% and 99% certain; most media reported this as "90%" or "at least 90%" certain, understating the degree of certainty).(70) While this was a step up from the 2001 report's statement that human causation was "likely" (67% to 90% certain), the wrangling did not mean much for the making of policy. Everyone, or at least everyone who was not wedded to an opinion formed decades earlier, now understood that only human action could avoid a solid risk that warming would rise to intolerable levels 

  

  

=>A personal note

  

The IPCC leaders made this entirely clear in November when they published a "Synthesis" of the 2007 reports . The panel was now better known and better respected for sharing a Nobel Peace Prize with Gore, and the authors ventured to describe the risks plainly. With CO2 in the atmosphere rising a percent each year at an accelerating rate, we were likely, for example, to put a quarter of the world's species at risk of extinction. Still more likely would be, for example, "disruption of... societies" by storm floods. Less certain but no less important, there could be "abrupt or irreversible" impacts. For example, "sea level rise on century time scales cannot be excluded." If greenhouse gas levels kept rising unrestrained, well beyond twice the pre-industrial level, we were likely to see a radical impoverishment of many of the ecosystems that sustain our civilization.(71)