Adjectives

   

  

  
 

<=CO2 greenhouse  
 

<=Biosphere  

<=Aerosols

   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.  

   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)  

  

 

<=>Models (GCMs)  

  
 

=>Modern temp's

   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

   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

  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)  

   

  
 

<=Simple models  
 

=>Public opinion

   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

   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

   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

   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

   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.)  

  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*)  

   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. 

  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

   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

   Up to this point the United States had dominated climate dicussions, as it dominated most scientific affairs while the rest of the world's advanced nations were digging out of the ruins of the Second World War. But now that the other economies and research establishments had recovered, international discussions began to dominate the discourse. The driving force, 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.  

  The most  important initiative was a series of invitational meetings for meteorologists sponsored by all three organizations, with particular impetus from UNEP's influential director, Mostafa Tolba. Beginning in 1980 the meetings gathered scientists for intense discussions in Villach, a quiet town in the Austrian Alps. A historic turning point was the 1985 Villach conference, where experts from 29 countries both rich and poor, representing a variety of widely separated fields, exchanged knowledge and argued over ideas. By the end of the meeting they had formed a prototype of an international climate science community, a community with a firm consensus. From their review of the evidence that had accumulated in the past half-dozen years (supercomputer models, the discovery that CO2 levels had plunged during past ice ages, an observed rising of global temperature, a SCOPE assessment of the likely impacts of warming and so forth), the Villach scientists agreed that greenhouse gases could warm the Earth by several degrees, with grave consequences. But it was a more recent and surprising calculation that made “the biggest buzz of the conference.” Methane gas and various other gases emitted by industry and agriculture, which were rapidly accumulating in the atmosphere but had attracted little attention until now, could have a collective effect on climate roughly equal to the effect of CO2 itself. The climate changes that had been predicted to come when the level of CO2 doubled, a century in the future, would in fact come on twice as fast—within their own lifetimes. "Suddenly the climate change issue became much more urgent," recalled Bolin, who supervised the meeting's scientific report.(26)  

  

   

  

  

  
 

<=CO2 greenhouse

<=Models (GCMs)

<=Modern temp's  

  

  

<=Other gases

  It was Bolin who wrote the 500-page report of the Villach conference, quietly translating the group's scientific findings into a bold warning — "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 the report also took a more activist stance than scientists had normally taken. Brought together as individual researchers in their personal capacities, with no official governmental responsibilities, they felt free to respond to the alarming conclusions that emerged from their discussions. In their concluding statement the Villach group pointed out that governments made many policies (building dams and dikes, managing farmlands and forests, etc.) under the assumption that the climate would be the same in the future as in the past. That was no longer a sound approach. Indeed the prospect of climate change demanded more than a passive response. Pointing out that "the rate and degree of future warming could be profoundly affected by governmental policies," the Villach report called on governments to consider positive actions, even a "global convention" to prevent too much global warming. Climate science, in short, was no longer just a matter for scientists.(26a)  

  

  

  

  

  

<=>Impacts  

   

= Milestone

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   The press took no notice, but Bolin and others made sure that the Villach recommendations came to the attention of the international scientific leadership. As a practical result, 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)  

   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.  

   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)