Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
groups and the plenary only exacerbated this trend toward conservative
results.
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So, too, did the well-organized efforts of industry lobbyists and
conservative governments serve to water down the IPCC conclusions. As
a result, the first assessment report, though certainly an implicit call for
policy action by its very existence, fell short of the bold recommendations
that international scientific leaders like Bert Bolin had hoped for.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the IPCC allowed political
actors to define the problem of climate change in terms of competing
scientific views rather than the competing political and economic inter-
ests really at stake. UNEP and the WMO did not create the IPCC as a
policy mechanism; they created it as a mechanism for producing a cer-
tain form of politically negotiated consensus knowledge. But because
the IPCC overtly presaged the creation of the UNFCCC, delegates were
able use this knowledge-making process to influence future political
negotiations.
Negotiations by the Soviet Union— most likely one of the few “win-
ners” in moderate scenarios of climate change— provide an apt example.
As negotiations unfolded, the Soviets grew increasingly uncomfortable
with the limitations a strong convention on climate change would likely
impose on the development of its oil fields. Looking for wiggle room in
future talks, Soviet representatives attacked the Working Group 1 con-
sensus for failing to include Soviet scientists' paleoclimate data, which,
though it did not undermine the broader IPCC consensus, created new
wrinkles of uncertainty. The issue was clearly an economic one for the
Soviet government, but the Soviets' primary tactic for defending their eco-
nomic interests from potentially threatening climate change policy was to
destabilize the consensus on climate change science.
The Soviets were not alone in their machinations. In Working Group 3,
American officials attempted to shift the potential policy response to
include not just CO
2
but also a wide variety of greenhouse gases the United
States had already begun to regulate in other contexts.
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Delegates argued
over carbon sources and sinks, greenhouse gas concentrations, and the
duration of those gases in the atmosphere, but ultimately these scientific
debates were important only as far as they helped determine nations' liabil-
ity under a future convention on climate change. The IPCC thus codified
the consensus-making process as a de facto forum for geopolitics as usual,
couched in the technical language of uncertainty and climatic complexity.
