The Age of Global Warming: A History (19 page)

Bridgman for one rejected the idea of a purpose beyond the pursuit of knowledge. ‘To attempt to broaden the concept of science to include social responsibility, as appears to the popular temper at present can result only in confusion,’ he wrote in 1959.
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Three years later, the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi said much the same thing in an article extolling the republic of science: ‘I appreciate the generous sentiments which actuate the aspiration of [society] guiding the progress of science into socially beneficent channels, but I hold [this aspiration] to be impossible and indeed nonsensical.’
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The role of science became like medicine. The point of acquiring knowledge is to diagnose and cure malady. Thus climate science, particularly after 1988, developed as the most important branch of what might be called global therapeutics. The principal justification for climate science is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but diagnosing the world’s ills and defining the parameters of the therapy required by the patient. 

With the irruption of global warming into world affairs, scientists mounted a radical extension of Polanyi’s republic, in the process turning it upside down. Scientists were now directing science into what they decided were socially and environmentally beneficent channels in a project that required governments to implement the prescription scientists and like-minded experts had devised. The justification for governments to do so was not subject to objective verification, because global warming precluded this. Henceforth, the word of scientists was to be taken on trust. 

The rigorous methodology developed by Popper and the verification standards required by a physicist such as Bridgman were now replaced. This did not happen because of the emergence of a superior epistemological standard; that is to say from the development of a new and sharper theory of knowledge. The explanation is quite different. Far from becoming obsolete, they had become inconvenient. Dependence on consensus made it all the more important to ensure that the consensus continued to prevail, especially as the future of the planet was at stake.

This provided strong incentives to sustain the consensus and maintain the world’s interest; otherwise, the action which the consensus required would not be taken. For exactly the same reasons, those who expressed their doubts represented a threat. Dissenters needed to be crushed and dissent de-legitimised. They were stooges of oil companies and fossil fuel interests, free market ideologues, or climate change deniers. In the years after 1988, much reputational capital of prestigious scientific bodies and of governments was sunk into global warming, further reducing the incentives for being open to debate and criticism.

For Popper, intolerance and lack of respect for dissenting opinions were antithetical to the precepts of an open society. Dissent is also linked to the success of science in expanding scientific knowledge because criticism is the engine of the growth of knowledge. ‘What is called objectivity consists solely in the critical approach,’ Popper wrote in 1963.
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The growth of scientific knowledge came not from the accumulation of observations, Popper argued, but from the repeated overthrow of scientific theories and their replacement by better or more satisfactory ones. This marked science out from virtually all other fields of human endeavour. Since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, the West left far behind all past civilisations – surpassing even the brilliance and originality of the ancient Greeks. Scientific advance represents the supreme intellectual accomplishment of Western civilisation.

A precondition for the Scientific Revolution was the freedom to question orthodoxy and the rejection of authoritarianism. Scientists based their claim to progress by pointing to the standards later distilled by Popper. Global warming’s inability to meet the verifiability and falsifiability standards set by the Scientific Revolution constitutes a reversion to pre-modern modes of defining what should be accepted as knowledge based on appeals to authority.  

The significance of global warming in the history of science is not that it represented a change of paradigm within a branch of science. It was a change in the paradigm of science itself.

*  In a 1991 paper, Canadian mathematician Christopher Essex demonstrated that the effect on global surface temperature of increased levels of carbon dioxide could be less than zero. Christopher Essex, ‘What Do Climate Models Tell Us About Global Warming?’ in
Pure and Applied Geophysics PAGEOPH
, Vol. 135, Issue 1 (1991), pp. 125–33.

*  Coal-fired power stations occupy a unique place in the demonology of global warming, being held responsible as the main culprits of global warming and the cause of the cooling in the third quarter of the last century. In 2008, Hansen compared trains carrying coal to power stations to those that carried Jews to the concentration camps. Thus a speculative view of the future has been accorded the same evidential status as historical fact, moreover the fact of the greatest crime of all time, and doubters about the former are subliminally bracketed with deniers of the latter (James Hansen, ‘Global Warming Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near’ www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TwentyYearsLater_20080623.pdf).

13

Green Warrior

The core of Tory philosophy and for the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy – with a full repairing lease.

Margaret Thatcher, 14
th
October 1988
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In 1988, climate scientists put global warming onto the international political agenda. In the three and a half years to the Rio Earth summit in June 1992, politicians joined scientists. In signing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, they committed themselves to the convention’s objective of stabilising greenhouse gases at a level that would avoid ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system’. After Rio, debating the science of global warming became superfluous. Politics had settled the science. 

The speed with which the rhetoric of alarm was ratcheted up is astonishing. A March 1989 article in the
Financial Times
on the Green Revolution in international relations spoke of heightened concern about the environment, ‘rising panic is scarcely too strong a phrase’.
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A conference the previous month in New Delhi warned of apocalyptic scenarios. ‘Global warming is the greatest crisis ever faced collectively by humankind,’ its final report claimed.
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The next month saw an international conference at The Hague organised by the French, Dutch and Norwegian prime ministers. Twenty-four governments signed a declaration suggesting that human life was under imminent threat. ‘The right to live [sic] is the right from which all other rights stem,’ the Hague Declaration began. ‘Today, the very conditions of life on our planet are threatened by the severe attacks to which the earth’s atmosphere is subjected.’
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In addition to the three sponsoring governments, signatories included Canada, West Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India and Zimbabwe, whose oppressed citizens had more reason to fear their ruler than the composition of the atmosphere. News of global warming reached Buckingham Palace. In her 1989 Commonwealth Day message, the Queen spoke of threats to the environment so far-reaching it was difficult to grasp them. ‘We hear, for example, of the possibility of radical changes in our climate leading, among other things, to a rise in the sea level, with all that would mean for small islands and low-lying regions.’
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For some, the second environmental wave came just too late. A rival accused Al Gore of running for national scientist in his 1988 presidential campaign. ‘I started to wonder whether the issues I knew to be important were peripheral after all,’ Gore wrote in
Earth in the Balance
, ‘I began to doubt my own political judgement.’
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Global warming barely registered in the presidential election that year. True, the Democratic party platform called for regular world environmental summits to address global threats such as the ‘greenhouse effect’, but its presidential candidate Michael Dukakis framed the environment as a law enforcement issue. ‘We’re going to have an Environmental Protection Agency that is more interested in stopping pollution than in protecting the polluters,’ he told the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.
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Not to be outdone, Vice President Bush told the Republican Convention a month later that he was going to have the FBI trace medical wastes and infected needles dumped into America’s lakes and rivers.
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At a campaign stop in Michigan, Bush said he would use the ‘White House effect’ to tackle the greenhouse effect and pledged to convene a global conference on the environment at the White House during his first year as president. 

James Baker, the new secretary of state, was quicker off the mark. His first speech was to the IPCC’s Working Group III on developing response strategies, ten days after taking office. ‘We face the prospect of being trapped on a boat that we have irreparably damaged, not by the cataclysm of war, but by the slow neglect of a vessel we believed impervious to our abuse,’ Baker told representatives from forty countries.
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The World Resources Institute, one of Washington’s leading environmental pressure groups, praised Baker’s speech. It was ‘a positive shift in commitment’ compared to the Reagan administration. Bolin thought otherwise. Baker had not realised the scope of oncoming climate change or the scale of the response required.
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Things weren’t so positive in a closed door session at which the US officials proposed a plan to collect more data before acting. Some observers blamed the call for delay on mid-level staff held over from the Reagan administration.
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They couldn’t have been more wrong. Opposition came not from remnants from the previous administration, but from the most senior White House staff.

Responding to international pressure, in May the Bush administration conceded that it would support the negotiation of a framework convention. At the G7 summit in Paris, host President Mitterrand observed that environmental issues had never before been the subject of as many conversations and so many decisions.
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The G7 leaders agreed that ‘decisive action’ was urgently needed to understand and protect the Earth’s ecological balance. This included ‘common efforts to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which threaten to induce climate change, endangering the environment and ultimately the economy’, adding that they strongly supported the work of the IPCC.
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Protecting the environment required ‘early adoption, worldwide, of policies based on sustainable development’.
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Risking international isolation, the Bush administration maintained a clear line: it would not agree to anything that legally bound the United States to targets or to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide by a specific time. This led to fierce criticism. William Nitze, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Reagan and Bush administrations until he resigned in 1990, charged that the eventual outcome had been a success for American diplomacy, but a failure of presidential leadership. (He went on to serve in the Clinton administration at the Environmental Protection Agency.) Al Gore compared Bush’s policy to the Senate’s refusal to ratify the Versailles Treaty that prepared the way for the Second World War. By not providing the world with leadership in the face of what Gore called the ‘assault by civilisation on the global environment’, Bush was ‘inviting a descent toward chaos’.
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That the Bush administration’s position was not a function of some hard-line ideology can be seen with the Reagan administration’s response to fears about depletion of the ozone layer. In 1974 two American chemists alerted the world that stratospheric ozone could be destroyed by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) being broken down to release chlorine, increasing the amount of ultra-violet radiation reaching the surface of the planet. In the 1970s, countries began unilaterally to cut their consumption of CFCs. In 1985, two months after the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer had been agreed, the British Antarctic Survey found a hole in the ozone layer (which had thinned by forty percent in eight years). The Reagan administration played a key role in negotiating the 1987 Montreal Protocol binding signatories to steep cuts in CFCs, which came into force at the beginning of 1989. President Reagan and George Shultz hailed it as a magnificent achievement. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan described it as perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.
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US support was a product of hard-headed calculation. According to Richard Benedick, the US lead negotiator, a major breakthrough came with a cost-benefit analysis by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Despite the scientific and economic uncertainties, the monetary benefits of preventing future deaths from skin cancer far outweighed the costs of CFC control as estimated either by the industry or by the Environmental Protection Agency.
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However, if the US acted alone, there would be little long-term benefit. It was better for the US to get as many countries to join in as possible. At Reagan’s insistence, US negotiators lowered the participation threshold at which the agreement would come into force.

The discovery of the ozone hole provided the world dramatic narrative of industrial pollutants exposing people to increased risk of skin cancers, premature skin ageing and eye cataracts. Finding substitutes for CFCs as aerosol propellants and refrigerants was straightforward and relatively inexpensive. As a result, politicians could and did act quickly and decisively. In the words of the political scientist Scott Barrett, from whose book this account is largely drawn, ‘the achievements of the Montreal controls are truly outstanding’.
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By providing governments with a template as to how they could tackle global warming, the Montreal Protocol misled most of them – the US being the most important exception – into believing that global warming might be amenable to similarly straightforward treatment. Prime among them was the world leader who first raised the alarm.

‘Mrs Thatcher, looking back over your life,’ the BBC’s Michael Buerk asked, ‘are you really a friend of the earth?’
The Greening of Mrs Thatcher
, broadcast on 2
nd
March 1989, drew from Thatcher some of the most surprising things she ever said.

There was more than a hint of green in her final years at Number 10. Unlike Nixon’s green phase, hers was a product of conviction, not political calculation. She was changing the political weather, Nixon was reacting to it. On the environment, Thatcher had profound differences with her ideological soul mate Ronald Reagan. She supported action against acid rain, Reagan blocked it; she believed in the dangers of resource depletion, he thought they were baloney. Even when they agreed on the ozone layer, it was for different reasons, hers being environmental, his the health and economic wellbeing of Americans.

Environmental policies used to be mostly about cleaner rivers and smog-free cities, Thatcher answered Buerk. The problems had been localised, there hadn’t been the realisation of a global dimension, ‘there was no greenhouse effect up there somewhere. There was no ozone layer’. She said how she’d overruled scientific advice and saved the British Antarctic Survey. ‘I have always been interested in Antarctica. There is some marvellous wildlife there, there is probably a good deal of mineral deposits.’ It was a fantastic, icy place that wasn’t a wasteland, and recounted a meeting with members of the survey. ‘They came into the next room and gave me a marvellous account of everything they are doing just a few weeks ago.’

She was worried about the greenhouse effect: ‘We still do not fully understand the greenhouse gases or how they are going to operate, but we do know that we have to do something.’ At that stage, emissions cuts were not on that ‘to do’ list.  Her priority was trees. ‘We are giving very considerable help on research into forestry and into the planting of tropical forests and into the preservation of tropical forests.’ 

According to her policy aide, George Guise, Thatcher’s thinking had been particularly influenced by her conversations with the billionaire financier, Sir James Goldsmith, who owned an eighteen-thousand-acre estate on the Pacific coast of Mexico and whose brother, Edward, had helped put together the 1972
Blueprint for Survival
.
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Thatcher told Buerk that planting trees would help solve Bangladesh’s perennial flooding.

When President Ershad was here recently, I said: ‘Look this is quite absurd. You are getting floods year after year. Really, we want the silt out of your rivers, put back on to the hills into the country behind you, into Nepal and India, and planted with trees again.’

The real difficulty with the developing world, she said, was that they wanted higher standards of living and to get out of poverty. ‘That is why we have the concept under Mrs Brundtland of sustainable development with which we firmly agree.’ She also favoured nuclear energy. ‘I would prefer more nuclear power because it is not fundamentally interfering with the world’s eco-systems.’

‘Finally Mrs Thatcher,’ Buerk asked, ‘if and when you finish being Prime Minister, would you want to be remembered as somebody who had helped to save the world in this environmental sense?’ ‘Enormously so, enormously so,’ she replied. ‘My whole sort of political philosophy is that what you have inherited from your forefathers, it is your duty to add to it … The problems science has created, science can in fact solve and we are setting about it.’

At the end of 1988, the Maltese government sponsored a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations on the conservation of the climate as mankind’s common heritage. The resolution said rising greenhouse gases could produce global warming which ‘could be disastrous for mankind’ and encouraged the convening of global, regional and national conferences to raise awareness of global warming.
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From 1989 there was a marked intensification in the rhythm of international conferences on global warming.

The most important were the ministerial meeting that produced the Hague Declaration in March, the Noordwijk ministerial conference in November, the Bergen Conference on sustainable development in May 1990, and the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva in November. Shortly before the Geneva conference, European Community (EC) environment ministers meeting in Luxembourg agreed an EC-wide goal of stabilising carbon dioxide emissions at current levels by 2000 (a target that would only be met because German emissions fell with the incorporation of East Germany and Britain’s dash-for-gas).
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The resolution also requested the IPCC to produce its report ‘as soon as possible’ and in time for the Geneva conference less than two years away.

At the UN, Crispin Tickell regularly held informal gatherings of the ambassadors of the five permanent Security Council members in his New York apartment and briefed the secretary-general afterwards. At one of his meetings, Tickell floated the idea of an environmental conference to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Stockholm conference. The idea was taken up.
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Initially it was to be at Stockholm again. The Brazilian government wanted the conference in Rio de Janeiro. The Swedish government quickly agreed, so Rio it was.

The conference momentum soon put Thatcher onto the defensive. Asked in the House of Commons why she wasn’t going to the twenty-four-nation conference at The Hague, Thatcher gave no quarter: ‘The conference is to set up yet another organisation, which is not necessary, and it proposes that compensation should be paid – without saying how – and that sanctions should be applied if rules are not complied with – again without saying how.’
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To the horror of civil servants, Britain did not even send an observer. According to a senior Dutch official, the new world ecological institutions could grow in the same way as the European Commission, Parliament and Court had grown out of an embryonic European coal and steel community.
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No wonder Mrs Thatcher stayed away.

Seven months later at the Noordwijk conference in November, with more than three times the number of countries, the negotiations went in a different direction – emissions cuts. Britain brokered an agreement between the ambitions of the Europeans for firm commitments to stabilise emissions and the refusal of the US, joined by the Soviet Union and Japan, to do so. The declaration fudged the issue by recognising the need to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions ‘as soon as possible,’ while recording the view of many industrialised nations that this should be achieved at the latest by 2000.
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No one could have foreseen that the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the implosion of its economy would enable the Russian Federation to record a forty-one per cent fall in carbon dioxide emissions between 1990 and 2000, a reminder of the inscrutability of even the near future.
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