Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Working Group 3 provided possible strategies for responding to the threat
of climate change. In addition, a smaller, less formal fourth working group
tackled the specific concerns and problems of developing nations, and an
administrative bureau oversaw the larger process.
42
UNEP and the WMO
asked for reports from each group by 1990, at which point they planned to
convene as a larger body to compile the reports into a single, authoritative
assessment and to hash out an executive summary of that assessment.
The key to the IPCC was its intergovernmental character. Unlike
at Villach, Bolin and his UNEP/WMO colleagues deliberately sought
to engage national representatives in the consensus-making machinery
of the IPCC. The IPCC consensus was to be more than an agreement
among scientists or NGOs; it was to be an agreement among govern-
ments. In part, the intergovernmental nature of the new assessment was
a response to U.S. criticisms of prior climate change meetings; indeed,
the Reagan administration insisted that the consensus process involve
official government scientists.
43
But independent of the United States,
Bolin and Tolba also recognized the importance of establishing a process
that gave international political actors ownership over the issue of climate
change. By participating in the IPCC, even skeptical governments— the
United States, the Soviet Union, and many countries in the developing
world— tacitly agreed that the problem merited some sort of international
solution.
Bolin spelled the argument out to an impatient Stephen Schneider in
the late 1980s. Schneider complained that assessment work was bogging
down real work in climate science; a new assessment process would only
further divert resources away from original research and add little to the
myriad national reports of the 1980s. “How many of those [assessments] are
convincing people in India or Indonesia or developing countries who don't
trust the science that comes out of it?” Bolin asked. “Will it be possible
to have climate policy without having a scientific group in which various
countries in the world have some political ownership?”
44
Once an inclu-
sive IPCC released its conclusions, Bolin recognized, participating nations
theoretically had little recourse to object about the basic facts when it came
time to negotiate a framework convention on climate change. Scientists
and U.N. leaders thus traded some control over producing consensus on
the science of climate change in return for an implicit political commit-
ment to cooperate on international mechanisms for climate policy.
