Global Warming and Economic Development: A Holistic Approach to International Policy Co-operation an

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This ebook constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the second one foreign convention on Theoretical and Mathematical Foundations of laptop technological know-how, ICTMF , held in Singapore in may well The convention was once held including the second one foreign convention on excessive functionality Networking, Computing, and conversation platforms, ICHCC , which complaints are released in CCIS Download e-book for iPad: Area, Performance and by Catherine H.

Even though learn in architectural synthesis has been performed for over ten years it has had little or no effect on undefined. This in our view is because of the shortcoming of present architectural synthesizers to supply area-delay aggressive or "optimal" architectures, that would aid interfaces to analog, asynchronous, and different complicated procedures.

Shengyong Cai, Timothy J. This quantity comprises the articles offered on the twenty second overseas Meshing Roundtable IMR geared up, partly, via Sandia nationwide Laboratories and was once hung on Oct , in Orlando, Florida, united states. Cryptology and Network Security: This booklet constitutes the refereed lawsuits of the twelfth overseas convention on Cryptology and community safety, CANS , held in Paraty, Brazil, in November The 18 revised complete papers offered including 4 invited talks have been conscientiously reviewed and chosen from fifty seven submissions.

The papers are prepared in topical sections on cryptanalysis, zero-knowledge protocols, dispensed protocols, community safety and purposes, complex cryptographic primitives, and verifiable computation. Extra info for Global Warming and Economic Development: This now leads us to the carbon cycle model. The scenarios are classified by the pollution type processes.

The same thing was happening in most fields of science during the economically stagnant s. 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. Lamb established in 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. 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.

One notable example was Robert M. White, who in his position as head of the U. Weather Bureau, and afterward of the agency responsible for all government meteorology and oceanography NOAA , was his nation's official representative to the WMO. Now in all his official capacities he pressed for cooperative research on climate change, using American government commitments to influence WMO and vice versa. The participants laid plans for a pioneering World Climate Conference. Their mode of organization was crucial, setting a standard for many later efforts.

Participation would be 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 experts from more than 50 countries convened in a World Climate Conference in Geneva in under the chairmanship of the invaluable Bob White to examine the review papers and recommend conclusions.

The experts' views were diverse, and they managed to reach a consensus only that there was a "serious concern that the continued expansion of man's activities" — in particular emissions of CO 2 — "may cause significant extended regional and even global changes of climate. Governments should therefore start preparing "to redirect, if necessary, the operations of many aspects of the world economy, including agriculture and the production of energy. 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. After SCOPE issued a report, when journalists at a press conference asked a leader of the work what he thought governments should do, he replied, "They should read the report. The most influential work of those who attended the Vienna conference was structural. Besides organizing the Geneva meeting, they called for a climate program established in its own right, to replace the miscellaneous collection of uncoordinated "meteorological" studies.

It inherited the GARP organization and logistics, including WMO administrative support plus its own small staff, and an independent scientific planning committee. 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. Up to this point the United States had dominated climate discussions, 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 exchanges became crucial. The driving force, as one observer remarked, was "a small group of 'entrepreneurs,' who promoted what they viewed as global rather than national interests. The most important initiative was a series of invitational meetings for meteorologists sponsored by all three organizations, with particular impetus from UNEP's farsighted director, the Egyptian biologist Mostafa Tolba.

Beginning in the meetings gathered scientists for intense discussions in Villach, a quiet town in the Austrian Alps. A historic turning point was the 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 CO 2 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.

The climate changes that had been predicted to come when the level of CO 2 doubled, a century in the future, would in fact come on twice as fast—within their own lifetimes. It was Bolin who wrote the page report of the Villach conference, quietly translating the group's scientific findings into a bold warning: 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. 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 insisted that "Governments should take into account" the conference's conclusions "in their policies on social and economic development and control of emissions of radiatively active gases.

Climate science, in short, was no longer just a matter for scientists. The press took no notice, but Bolin, Tolba and others made sure that the Villach recommendations came to the attention of the international scientific leadership. 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. In particular, a workshop in Bellagio, Italy in included politicians and policy experts as well as scientists among its two dozen participants. They took a first stab at setting policy by proposing a target: Some of those present began to lay plans for a major conference to be held the following year in Toronto.

Of course, none of this work was actually done by abstract "organizations. 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 had a firm base in his position as professor of meteorology at the University of Stockholm. Villach and other world conferences, along with similar consensus-building studies on climate change carried out in the s by national bodies such as the U.

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 s, 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. The scientific arguments became entangled with emotions. 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. 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 some scientists and officials tentatively proposed policy changes, many more were pushing for better international research projects.

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. Starting up in , the IGBP built its own large structure of committees, panels, and working groups. The WCRP remained active in its sphere, launching international collaborations in meteorology and related oceanography. 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. The first great effort had been what is sometimes called the largest scientific experiment ever conducted: During large numbers of aircraft, drifting buoys, ships, balloons and satellites made observations with the participation of some nations.

It took several years to process the data, but the result was standardized weather numbers covering the entire globe in a uniform grid for an entire year — exactly what computer teams needed as a reality check for their climate models. Scheduled to run through the mid s, these were complex institutions, coordinating the work of hundreds of scientists and support staff from a variety of institutions in dozens of nations under the auspices of the WCRP. Two participants described the developments of the s 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 and satellites, but equally by great improvements in international networking thanks to cheap air travel and telecommunications. Research impelled a major policy breakthrough in the late s, 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 The result was a Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, signed by 20 nations in 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 urgent. In the epochal Montreal Protocol of the Vienna Convention, governments formally pledged to restrict emission of specific ozone-damaging chemicals. 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 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. 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 only a 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 serve as an example for negotiations to restrict greenhouse gas 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, , in a "World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security," nicknamed the Toronto Conference.

The planning came out of the AGGG's Bellagio workshop 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. There were a few ministers among the attendees, notably Brundtland, but most countries were represented by relatively junior people. 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.

Immediate action was needed, they said, to negotiate an "international framework convention" as a condition for national legislation. That was the Montreal Protocol model: Some participants did not wish to step beyond strictly scientific findings into the realm of politics, but the conference set these hesitations aside: 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 the world's emissions were well above the level. The Toronto Conference attracted much publicity, and politicians at the highest level began to pay attention to greenhouse gases.

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 speech to the Royal Society.

She showed she meant it by increasing the funding for climate research although most of the money was only 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.

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One immediate consequence was a 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 NGOs around the world. What had begun as a research puzzle had become a serious international public concern and a diplomatic issue. 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. 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. The steep climb of concern in scientific, public, and official circles did not translate into any exceptional increase of funding in the s.

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 s most of the industrialized countries, from the United States through Western Europe to the Soviet Union, failed to increase their research spending. With jobs in research scarcer than applicants, students were not attracted to the grueling labor of winning a PhD. 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 s.

After stalling in 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. Climate research remained quite a small field of science in the s. 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.

They knew each other well, by reputation and often personally. 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.

And it did not commit any particular group to following up systematically. 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 tiny elite committee.


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    8. 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, Policy-makers concerned about climate looked for a way to supersede the AGGG with a new kind of institution. The principal impetus came from the United States government, where the Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department and others were pushing for an international convention to restrict greenhouse gases.

    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, fully independent group under the direct control of representatives appointed by each government — that is, an intergovernmental body.

    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. The AGGG was not formally abolished. But within two years that small body ceased to meet, as most of the world's climate scientists were drawn into the IPCC's processes.


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    Note that contrary to myths that later spread widely, the IPCC was neither an organ of the United Nations nor the creation of liberals; it was an autonomous intergovernmental body created chiefly by the conservative Reagan administration. Required to issue rules and reports only with the firm agreement of essentially all the world's leading climate scientists plus the consensus of all participating governments without exception, the IPCC's constitution should have been and perhaps was intended to be a recipe for paralysis. By the panel would turn its procedural restraints into a virtue: In the teeth of opposition from the immensely powerful fossil fuels industry and its many allies, the IPCC would issue what was arguably the most important policy advice any body has ever given, calling for nothing less than a wholesale restructuring of the world's economies and ways of living.

    Whether or not governments paid heed, in fulfilling its declared purpose of providing advice the IPCC has rightly been considered a remarkable success. Although exceptional in the scope of its mission and effort, the IPCC was not unique in its methods and outcome. In particular, a requirement for consensus, and the procedures and mores that make it workable, were built into the decision-making of many other international regimes that employed scientific research to address environmental problems.

    According to a survey by political scientists, in general these regimes have been surprisingly effective. Most people were scarcely aware that all these international initiatives relied on a key historical development: 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 — 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. The effect was visible in all areas of human endeavor, but it often came first in science, internationally and democratically minded since its origins. Indeed the procedures and mores of the scientific community are historically inextricable from the development of a cosmopolitan, egalitarian civil society.

    Week by week they hammered out rational understandings as they sought agreement on the validity of the latest theories and experiments. This spirit was taken up in the Enlightenment salons, Freemason lodges, and other venues where scientists and foreigners were welcomed and honored — institutions that played a central role in the spread of republicanism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

    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. Such a transnational scientific influence on policy matched dreams held by liberals since the nineteenth century.

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    It awoke corresponding suspicions in the enemies of liberalism. 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 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 s, there had been only a few conferences each year where scientists presented papers on climate change, but in there were about 40, and in more than Hopes that the Toronto agreement would do for CO 2 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. 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 CO 2 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. 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.

    Working Group I — the one princiapally covered by these essays — would assess the physical science of climate change; groups II and III would address respectively impacts of climate change and policy responses. Unlike the First World Climate Conference, the Villach meetings, and the workshops of the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases, this was a large-scale, prolonged, and explicitly policy-oriented 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. Experts contributing their time as volunteers wrote working papers that drew on the latest studies, including some not yet published.

    These were debated at length in correspondence and workshops. Through , the IPCC scientists, 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. As political scientist Shardul Agrawala remarked, this "peer review was ad hoc, based more on a tradition of scientific conduct and trust than on any political norms.

    Another political scientist put it in more general terms: 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. The elaborate IPCC process, however, had educated many bureaucrats and officials about the climate problem, and most were ready to act.

    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. Even so, complete deadlock was avoided only by accepting the Working Groups' summaries as they stood.

    The prestige of the scientists, as scientists, was strong enough to give the authors an effective veto power over attempts to water down statements until they were meaningless. The result was not "mainstream" science so much as conservative, lowest-common-denominator science. The conclusions were neither the findings of scientific experts nor the political statements of governments — they were statements that the scientists agreed were scrupulously accurate and that the governments found politically acceptable.

    So when the IPCC finally announced its conclusions, they had solid credibility. Much of this might be caused by natural processes, the report conceded.

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    The scientists predicted correctly, as it turned out that it would take another decade before they could be confident that the change was caused by the greenhouse effect Drawing on computer studies, the panel thought it likely that by the middle of the next century the world might find itself warmer by somewhere between 1. 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 CO 2 , hinting at economically sound steps that the world might take at once to reduce future warming. The report did not silence the scientists who held that global warming was unlikely. The IPCC consensus, hammered out through a wearisome 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 s. 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.

    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 risk that greenhouse warming could yank the climate into a seriously different state. On one thing nearly all scientists agreed: 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. 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. Bush in the United States continued to reject any targets and timetables unless they were entirely voluntary and non-binding. The American administration, attacked by its closest foreign friends as an irresponsible polluter, showed some flexibility and made modest concessions.

    In these conferences formal decisions would be made by consensus in a plenary of all parties, that is, all nations that signed the treaty — essentially all the world's nations. The Framework Convention included targets for reducing emissions, but the central point was a solemn promise to work toward "stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. However, its evasions and ambiguities just what was "dangerous anthropogenic interference"?

    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. A historian of the negotiations leading to the Framework Convention thought it "remarkable that it was achieved at all," given the scientific uncertainties and the huge potential economic stakes. The scientists' report had "seized the intellectual high ground from the moment it was published," undercutting efforts by the United States and others to claim that uncertainty called for delays.

    The IPCC had established a cyclic international process. Roughly twice a decade, the panel 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 in a Conference of the Parties, 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 So the experts went back to work. There were more of them every year as concern about climate change spread in the scientific community, and each successive IPCC report had a much larger group of authors than the one before.

    This was driven not only by an increase in scientific research but also by political concerns in the broadest sense. The early IPCC was dominated by geophysicists and other physical scientists. But to many people, especially in developing countries, the problem of global warming involved not just physics but social and economic questions. It was the developed industrial countries that had dumped most of the extra CO 2 into the air, gobbling up resources while the rest of the world struggled to avoid starvation.

    And the poverty and geography of developing nations left them especially vulnerable to climate change. Admitting its shortcomings, the IPCC reorganized itself. Meanwhile funds were raised to support scientists from developing countries. The first job was simply to pay for their travel to attend meetings, but gradually over the years many ways were found to increase not only their representation but their participation in research.

    In particular, each Working Group would be co-chaired by one scientist from a developed country and one from a developing country. Meanwhile in the governments of developing nations pushed the United Nations to create an International Negotiation Committee, a forum for policy questions that went beyond the subjects the IPCC scientists were supposed to address.

    In yet another intermediary, a Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, was set up to help arbitrate between the worlds of science and diplomacy. This body, which eventually included representatives of nearly all the world's governments, argued out what the scientists' pronouncements really meant for policy-makers. That provided not only a forum to explore political differences, but a way to get the scientists to clarify their statements, and ultimately a certification of the reliability and significance of the IPCC's findings.

    Non-governmental organizations, ranging from oil companies to Greenpeace, took an important part in the discussions. Industry lobbyists and environmental group staff members showed up at the major conferences by hundreds and later by thousands, handing out reports and bending ears; their pronouncements were considered as seriously as the findings of state agencies. In the sometimes chaotic but thoroughly open debates, it was plain that every argument, from geophysical to moral, was on the table.

    The process is reminiscent of a phenomenon observed historically in the emergence of parliaments. Once a nominally representative body has been created, over decades or centuries it will enlarge its representation. This helps it to acquire prestige — and ultimately some degree of power over decisions. Meanwhile the scientific experts pored over a great variety of evidence and calculations. What impressed them most was one bit of new science. New runs of the models, some done especially for the IPCC and completed just in time for its report, 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. Another arduous process of analysis, discussion, negotiation, and lobbying occupied expert scientists, joined by representatives not only of governments but of every variety of non-governmental interest. Warned by the close approach to deadlock in , in the IPCC adopted a formal approach to its crucial summary statements: In the IPCC announced its conclusions to the world.

    While acknowledging many uncertainties, the experts found, first, that the world was certainly getting warmer. And second, that the warming was probably not entirely natural. They added, almost parenthetically, that abrupt and unwelcome climate surprises might be in store. The report's single widely quoted sentence said, "The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.

    The representatives, meeting at a Conference of the Parties in Madrid, had needed a day and a half to hammer out the final sentences in hostile debates. It was long after midnight, and the official translators had gone home, when the exhausted representatives reached final agreement after Bolin suggested replacing "appreciable" with "discernible. For all its qualifications the message was unmistakable. A main author of the Working Group I report, Benjamin Santer, came under vicious personal attack for making editorial changes — which he had done in obedience to the established procedures.

    The IPCC responded by revising its procedures, formalizing the editorial process with additional "review" editors. It was an example of the flexibility that made the panel unusually effective as an international organization. The IPCC report estimated that a doubling of CO 2 , which was expected to come around the middle of the 21st century, would raise the average global temperature somewhere between 1. That was exactly the range of numbers announced by important groups one after another ever since , when a committee of the U.

    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. The scientists who wrote the IPCC report decided to stick with the familiar figures of 1. 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. Conference on Climate Change held in Kyoto, Japan. This was a policy and media extravaganza attended by nearly 6, 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 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. 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. The agreement exempted poor countries for the time being, and pledged wealthy countries to cut their emissions significantly by This was only an initial experiment. It was due to end in , presumably to be followed by a better arrangement.

    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.

    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. Financial and industrial interests no longer presented a unified opposition. The first major industry to become worried had been the insurance business. In the early s it endured mammoth losses as storms and floods increased, which perhaps coincidentally was just what global warming theorists had predicted.

    A breakthrough came in 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 s, several 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. 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.

    The difficulties overwhelmed the next major international Conference of the Parties, held at The Hague in late Representatives from 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 Although the report was not yet completed, its main conclusions had been leaked to the delegates.

    International Cooperation

    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 under the chairmanship of environmental scientist Robert Watson, a frank advocate of policies to reduce greenhouse emissions. 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.

    Indeed the rate of warming was "very likely to be without precedent during at least the last 10, years. The worst-case scenario supposed that global emissions of CO 2 might 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. This range was not for the traditional doubled CO 2 level, which was now expected to arrive around midcentury, but for the still higher levels that would come after unless the world took action.

    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 CO 2 content of the preindustrial atmosphere, current thought is moving toward a tripling. The IPCC delegates could not agree on a precise statement about the probability that warming would truly fall within the range 1. But they did say it was "likely" that the warming during the next few decades would be 0. 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.