Adjectives

   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, with an assist from Gro Bruntdland, the dynamic Prime Minister of Norway (the only woman to hold that post) and a few other environment-minded world leaders. 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. Observers hailed the setting of this goal as a major accomplishment, if only as a marker to judge how governments responded (it would turn out that in 2005 the world's emissions were slightly above 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.  

  

 

<=>Public opinion  

  

  

  

 

  

Attention from the politically powerful "Greens" in Germany and elsewhere in continental Europe added to the issue's legitimacy. One immediate consequence was a 1989 meeting in Hanover, Germany where twenty environmentalists from Europe and the United States discussed ways to work together. The result was the Climate Action Network, a loose coalition of non-governmental organizations. (Within two decades the network was exchanging information and coordinating strategy among more than 360 NGOs around the world.) (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

   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. The U.S. administration and some other governments were also wary of control by the WMO or any other body that was part of the United Nations structure. Better to form a new, fully independent group under the control of government representatives.(43a)  

<=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 

  

  

  

=>Impacts

   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.  

  

  

  

  

=>Climatologists

   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: The Rise of the IPCC  =>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.