Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
18 The scientists and the apocalypse
Bernie Lewin
The meeting of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in
Sundsvall, Sweden, August 1990, witnessed a Third World revolt that was premeditated
and forewarned. It had already begun in the previous working group meetings set to
develop international policy responses to the climate crisis. But only in Sundsvall, under the
leadership of Brazil, did it succeed in smashing this carefully conceived science-to-policy
process at its very nexus. Within months the revolution was complete.
At the United Nations General Assembly that December, the climate treaty process
was taken from the IPCC and its UN parent bodies—the Environment Program (UNEP)
and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Instead, a new negotiating committee
would report directly to the General Assembly, where the poor countries commanded
an overwhelming majority. The IPCC, dominated by scientists from rich countries, was
directed to serve this new committee in the interim, until a subsidiary body for technical
advice could be established. As for the two peak science-policy organisations who first
conceived the IPCC, by winter 1991 they were out in the cold.
This banishment from the treaty process was particularly shocking for UNEP. In the
afterglow of its success with the ozone treaty, it was coming up to the twentieth anniversary
of its inception at the 1972 UN Stockholm conference where global environmentalism was
born. Riding a new wave of environmental consciousness, another grand conference was in
the planning to mark the anniversary. The Rio 'Earth Summit' of 1992 would be the biggest
UN talkfest to date, with its policy centre piece, the Framework Convention on Climate
Change (FCCC). But few would ever guess just how much this Convention was a political
triumph not for UNEP but for the conference hosts, Brazil. Its success would set in train the
roleofthepoorcountriesintheclimatetreatynegotiationswherethetalksstalledandstalled
again with their repeated attempts to use the pretext of warming mitigation to increase the
flow of aid.
In The Age of Global Warming Rupert Darwall details how global environmentalism
concentrated itself onto the global warming scare. 1 Here we take up with a group of activist
climate scientists, tracing how they entered this political game, how the greater politics of
the UN quickly overwhelmed and corrupted their science, and, finally, how the academies
of science were soon dragged down with them.
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