Adjectives

The report presents the findings of a team of external independent experts engaged by the European Commission to carry out the interim evaluation of the International Cooperation Activities of the Capacities Programme of the FP7. More info

28 July 2011

Information Meeting, 27 July 2011

The European Commission, Directorate General for Research and Innovation organised on 27 July 2011 an Information Meeting about the new calls for proposals under the 2012 Work Programme of the Activities of International Cooperation. The meeting was addressed to stakeholders and multipliers across Europe and beyond. Detailed information was provided on the activities targeted by the calls, namely the "bi-regional coordination of S&T cooperation including priority setting and definition of S&T cooperation policies (INCO-NET)" and the "Bilateral coordination for the enhancement and development of S&T Partnerships (BILAT)". See the Infoday presentations

28 July 2011

International dimension of the 2012 Work Programmes

The 2012 FP7 work programmes were adopted by the European Commission on 19 July. The first series of calls for proposals, with a budget of over €5.3 billion was launched on 20 July. The main focus of the calls is the integration of research with innovation to tackle societal challenges and create sustainable jobs and growth by giving Europe a lead in the key technology markets of the future. All of the calls are open for the participation of non-European researchers and/or research organisations working alongside their EU counterparts. More information by country or region

20 July 2011

EU-India Cooperation in water and bio-resources related challenges (calls for proposals)

We celebrated this year, on the occasion of the 7th EU-India Joint Steering Committee on Science and Technology (1st April 2011, Brussels), ten years of EU-India S&T cooperation since the signature of the Scientific and Technological Cooperation Agreement in 2001. Building on the good work done so far, we have agreed to enhance the scale, scope and impact of our cooperation.

As a concrete output of this, the EU and India have agreed to develop new cooperation in the field of water and bio-resources related challenges. Two co-ordinated water-related calls for proposals entailing a total funding of 32 M € were launched on 20 July and will be funded 50/50 by the Commission and the Indian authorities. Read more

8 July 2011

3rd EU-Korea S&T Joint Committee, Seoul

European Commission Deputy Director-General for Research and Innovation, Rudolf Strohmeier, and Assistant Minister (Office of R&D) of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Yul-Rae Cho, today co-chaired the Third Joint Committee Meeting between the European Union and Korea. Several other meetings and visits were organised in Seoul demonstrating a wish on both sides to reinforce cooperation, at the time of entry into force of both the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the new Framework Agreement. Read more 
 

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The Discovery of Global Warming                      July 2009  

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 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which went into effect in 2004, was a first step toward limiting greenhouse emissions. (There is a separate essay on the United States Government, which was central in international affairs.)  Keywords: climate change, global warming, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, International Panel, IPCC, World Meteorological Organization  

"The climatic world is one world even if politically we are not." — Reid Bryson(1)

   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)          - LINKS -

   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.  

   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

   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. 

   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

   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.  

   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)  

   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.  

   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 Victor A. Bugaev, a leader of the Soviet Union's meteorology office, and Harry Wexler, chief of the United States 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.  

  
 

Wexler & Bugaev, 1962

from WMO's history pages

  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.  

   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

   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

   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)

  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 after the U.S. launched a satellite that could watch the entire globe's weather from orbit, but this 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)  

  

  

<=Government

   The first step would be world-wide gathering and exchange of data. The WMO eagerly took up the proposal, forming a "task force" consisting of exactly two men, Bugaev and Wexler. They quickly organized 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. 

  

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)  

   

  
 

= Milestone  

  

  
 

=>Government

  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 was also one of the first scientists to study pollution from aerosols, showing that they had a significant cooling effect on the climate of entire regions. 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. It helped that he came from neutral Sweden, but it was more important that, as one colleague put it, Bolin was "a brilliant and honest scientist, who listened to and respected diverse views." Self-effacing and soft-spoken, as Bolin developed his diplomatic skills he would become the mainstay of international climate organizing efforts for the next quarter-century.(10a)