Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
6
the ipCC And the primACy oF sCienCe
in march of 1988, gloBal atmosPheric co
2
oscillated through
352 ppm on its way to its May peak, this time at 354 ppm. With little fanfare,
the Keeling Curve had turned thirty. For three decades, the Mauna Loa
Observatory had collected and compiled measurements of atmospheric
CO
2
that, when graphed by monthly mean over time, showed a 10 per-
cent increase in the gas over that time period. In 1988, those 357 monthly
averages had clearly taken the shape of the now-familiar undulating,
upward-sloping curve associated with global warming. Annual oscilla-
tions— iterations of a story of planetary respiration— taken together con-
stituted a larger secular trend in CO
2
, the greenhouse gas most associated
with the increasingly alarming issue of global warming.
The primary structures of the history of global warming had also begun
to take shape by 1988. The impacts of rising CO
2
had not yet begun to
appear, but the story already had the markings of tragedy. The science-
first advocacy that scientists and environmentalists developed to combat
global warming had failed to achieve meaningful political or environmen-
tal objectives. In fact, the top-down, science-first approach had actually
begun to undermine these objectives by leaving scientists vulnerable to
political change.
In 1988, a new iteration of the CO
2
story institutionalized this science-
first approach to advocacy at the international level in the form of the Inter-
governmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The IPCC represented
the apotheosis of the “forcing function of knowledge,” a self-conscious
