The scientists and the apocalypse - Climate Change: The Facts - page 173

Warming enthusiasm
The IPCC was conceived before the frenzy for action whipped up during the hot dry North
American summer of 1988, but it was then born into the storm of enthusiasm that ensued.
In the first place there was the grandstanding of extremists like Hansen. On top of that
came minor state leaders, like Gro Brundtland (Norway) and Brian Mulroney (Canada),
channelling the enthusiasm for sustainable development—something of a campaign yet to
finditscause.Then,toppingitall,cameMargaretThatcherpropellingclimateactionupthe
agenda of the Group of 7 talks. 14 And yet, after all the excitement of that summer, the first
sessionoftheIPCCintheautumnremainedarelativelylow-keyaffair.Only30delegations
arrived, and these mostly from northern countries already active in the research. 15 What
really drove political interest came only weeks later with the first resolution committing
the UN to protect the global climate. This resolution did more than endorse the new
UNEPWMO panel. The IPCC was also asked to make recommendations on the use of
'relevant existing international legal instruments' and to explore 'elements for inclusion in
a possible future international convention on climate' (Article 10). 16
And so begins 1989. The year the Cold War ended was extraordinary for the
intensification of interest in climate action at the intergovernmental level. While Wigley
and all the other authors were busy taking their chapters through the review process,
numerous ministerial conferences convened around the world to address the climate
emergency. Their concluding statements competed for the louder alarm while participants
queued to pledge themselves for saving the planet. Already in January, a harbinger of
the pending onslaught appeared before the IPCC. The US Secretary of State for the
new Bush administration, James Baker, chose for his first public engagement to open a
session of their Working Group III with a call for political action. 17 From the beginning,
political interest was concentrated on this 'policy' group—as Working Group III was often
called—and the USA had already won its chair. With this new UN resolution pushing
the IPCC further into the domain of policy development, the intensifying political interest
concentrated overwhelming pressure on this group.
However unwelcome this premature political excitement might be for Bolin as he tried
to deliver for it some scientific grounding, the effect was that Tolba's vision of a climate
treaty process now realised sufficient political ground. 18 And so Tolba formally submitted
a plan for UNEP to work with WMO and the IPCC towards delivering a framework
convention.
TheUNEPplanwasapprovedbytheGeneralAssemblyinDecember1989, 19 andfrom
early 1990, the detail was widely known and generally agreed: in August the IPCC would
approve its 'interim' report in Sundsvall before presenting it to the second World Climate
Conference in November and to the General Assembly in December; then, early in 1991,