Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
organization and influence of their business and industry counterparts was
an eye-opener. In a May 1990 meeting of Houghton's Working Group 1 in
Berkshire, England, for example, Jeremy Leggett, a Royal School of Mines
geologist turned Greenpeace activist, remembers sitting in the back row
alongside Dan Lashoff of the NRDC and “eleven scientists from the oil,
coal and chemical industries, including two from Exxon, one from Shell
and one from BP [British Petroleum].”
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These observers influenced the IPCC's assessment in two main ways.
First, because the IPCC defined these observers' roles only loosely, they
participated relatively openly in scientific discussions alongside govern-
ment scientists, especially when those discussions dealt with the wording
of the working group report summaries.
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In Working Group 1, scientists
like Leggett and Lashoff, who represented environmental organizations,
consistently pushed the IPCC to explicitly spell out the worst-case scenar-
ios of climate change for policymakers, to emphasize the full risk. Scien-
tists representing the oil, coal, and gas industries, many of them employed
by politically conservative think tanks committed to free-market ideals,
downplayed these worst-case studies and emphasized the uncertainties of
atmospheric modeling and the myriad, poorly understood complexities of
the global climate system.
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Just as important, nongovernmental scientists from both industry and
environmental groups sought to establish relationships with represen-
tatives of foreign governments in order to influence these governments'
positions on controversial aspects of the IPCC reports. Here they acted
essentially as lobbyists. Again, the two groups focused on attacking or
upholding the validity of models and the certainty of the science more
broadly.
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And again, environmental NGOs found themselves outnum-
bered and overmatched by representatives from the energy industry, who
were particularly effective in the role.
Negotiations over the specifics of the IPCC consensus only intensi-
fied as the working groups presented their reports to the IPCC plenary. In
the working groups, scientists representing nations and political interests
fought to define the boundaries of the information the IPCC would pro-
vide to policymakers. In the plenary, government representatives— includ-
ing some heads of state— focused on protecting their nations' interests
by adjusting the specific language in which the international community
would present that body of knowledge to the world. European states fought
