Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
gloBal Warming hits the mainstream
The Montreal Protocol was not the only force shaping the context in which
scientists introduced the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC was already in the works as the Keeling Curve quietly turned
thirty in March of 1988, but a series of political, scientific, and environmen-
tal events that summer heightened the urgency and political significance
of the assessment process, especially for the United States. Largely thanks
to anomalies of weather (easily conflated with changes in climate), global
warming hit the mainstream in 1988, and the issue's increased popularity
raised the public profile— and the stakes— of both CO
2
and the science
associated with it.
Throughout the mid-1980s, Al Gore and his fellow congressional Dem-
ocrats continued to push the Reagan administration to begin dealing with
the problem of climate change. In 1986, Senator Joe Biden introduced an
initiative mandating that the president commission an executive-level task
force to devise a strategy for responding to global warming— a strategy the
president was meant to deliver to Congress within one year.
45
The initiative
became the Global Climate Protection Act of 1987, which the president
signed.
46
The bill in the end required very little real commitment from the
administration, but it demonstrated an expanding congressional interest
in climate change that raised the domestic political profile of the State
Department's negotiations with UNEP and the WMO leading up to the
IPCC. It also led to more congressional hearings on the issue, which helped
keep global warming in the news and thus on the public agenda.
47
Nothing put climate in the public eye more than the environmental
events of 1987 and 1988, however. In the summer of 1987, a heat wave hit
the eastern United States, followed by the onset of a severe drought in the
major farm states of the Midwest. May, June, and July of 1988 brought even
more heat to the eastern United States and Canada in what one author
called “one of the most intense combinations of drought and heat since the
Dust Bowl of the 1930s.”
48
Crops in the Great Plains began to fail. The Mis-
sissippi River hit a record low water level, compromising the river's navi-
gability. High winds and severe drought turned small fires in Yellowstone
National Park into the largest conflagration in the park's recorded history,
affecting 36 percent of the land within its boundaries.
49
Abroad, a bad hur-
ricane season racked the Caribbean; floods ruined crops, killed livestock,
