Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
process but also over the science behind that process. Without backing
from powerful nations and corporations, leaders at environmental NGOs
and the United Nations found that scientific consensus yielded very little
real political action. If Mustafa Tolba and his colleagues hoped to replicate
their success with ozone by using science to support an international con-
vention on climate change, they first needed to establish political buy-in
on climate change science itself. The mechanism they developed for this
purpose was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
By the early 1980s, climate scientists already had several mechanisms
for creating independent scientific consensus. In the United States, the
National Academy of Sciences had produced major assessments of the
relevant components of climate, including
Energy and Climate
(1977), the
Charney Report (1979), and the Nierenberg Report (1983).
27
The National
Research Council went out of its way to avoid unsolicited policy proscrip-
tions, however; and especially after the equivocal Nierenberg Report, few
scientists saw the NAS as a viable forum for forward-looking discussions
about global warming. Abroad, meanwhile, the International Council
of Scientific Unions continued its decades-long collaboration with the
WMO, and in the early 1980s the ICSU and WMO hosted a series of con-
ferences on climate change in Villach, Austria, designed to thoroughly
assess the problem. Like the NAS assessments, however, these ICSU-
sponsored assessments self-consciously avoided the political implications
of climate change. As they had in the past, the recommendations revolved
around international research efforts and generally shied away from inter-
national politics.
That is, until 1985. Unlike its predecessors, the consensus report of the
last of these Villach conferences, held in October of that year, contained
somewhat vague but nevertheless striking recommendations for climate
change policy. If CO
2
and other greenhouse gases continued to accumulate
in the atmosphere, the report warned, “in the first half of the next century
a rise of global mean temperature would occur which is greater than any in
man's history. . . . Many important economic and social decisions are being
made on long term projects . . . based on the assumption that past climatic
data . . . are a reliable guide to the future. This is no longer a good assump-
tion since the increasing concentrations of GHGs [greenhouse gases] are
expected to cause significant warming of the global climate in the next
century.”
28
