The Age of Global Warming: A History (44 page)

We do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming. We do not know how much our climate could, or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it.
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From May 2001, Paula Dobriansky was responsible for leading the US team in the climate change negotiations, filling the post previously occupied by Tim Wirth and Frank Loy. On taking up her position, Dobriansky talked to both, the latter being particularly engaged (the two had previously worked together and had the same special assistant, Nigel Purvis, at the State Department). There had been questioning of the science at Cabinet-level meetings at the White House. So the National Academy of Sciences was brought in. Working closely with Dobriansky in the State Department, it assessed all types of issues relevant to climate change and ended up restating the consensus view.
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The initial phase came to an end on 9/11, when the focus switched to counter-terrorism. Subsequently a two-pronged strategy was developed: prioritising technological solutions and developing complementary diplomatic avenues to those established under the UN climate change convention. By 2007, the Bush administration had spent $37 billion on climate science, technology and incentive programmes.
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In parallel, it developed a series of international initiatives, including the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, and collaboration on projects such as carbon sequestration and the development of hydrogen fuel-cell technology. It culminated in May 2007 with the inception of the Major Economies forum to bring together the world’s largest emitters. 

American negotiators were frustrated at the incapacity of the UN process to produce results – ‘very challenging’, as Dobriansky called it.
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Indeed, the Major Economies initiative was similar to that set out in a June 2007 article by Todd Stern, a former Clinton administration official and later Obama’s climate envoy, and William Antholis of the Brookings Institution. They called for an ecological E8 of world leaders, half from the developed world, and half from developing nations.

In September, Boyden Gray, America’s ambassador to the EU, wrote in the
Financial Times
of the ‘sclerotic UN process’ hobbled by the participation of nearly two hundred countries. It had been US leadership of a small group of major countries that had driven through the Montreal Protocol and delivered ten times the greenhouse gas reduction of Kyoto, Gray reminded suspicious Europeans.
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However, the differences between the Montreal and Kyoto protocols were substantive as well as procedural. When the Montreal Protocol was concluded, there were ready substitutes for CFCs and the main emitters of ozone-depleting substances were the industrialised nations.  Attempting to repeat the success of the Montreal process pre-supposed that the principal emitters of carbon dioxide were willing and able to cut their emissions. With China adding new coal-fired power stations by the week and rapidly overhauling the US as the number one producer of carbon dioxide, the big question was: supposing China was not willing?

For Tony Blair, the obstacle wasn’t China and the other large emerging economies. It was President Bush. 2005 was the year to heighten the pressure ahead of July’s Gleneagles G8.

At the beginning of February, the British hosted a three-day conference, ‘Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change’, at the Met Office’s headquarters in Exeter. There were two ghosts at the party: Izrael and Illarionov. ‘Anyone who is frightened about the prospect of global warming is welcome to come and live in Siberia,’ Illarionov told a journalist.
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Other participants stuck to the script. Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, was alarmed by the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet.
*
Antarctica was no longer the ‘slumbering giant’ of the Third Assessment Report: ‘I would say that this is now an awakened giant.’
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Bill Hare of the Potsdam Institute told delegates that the 3
o
C increase expected by 2100 would kill off all the frogs and spiders in South Africa’s Kruger National Park and leave more than 3.3 billion people living in countries suffering large crop losses.
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Lord Oxburgh, chairman of Shell’s UK holding company, warned that unless governments took urgent action there ‘will be a disaster’.
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Was the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaching danger level? The previous month, Rajendra Pachauri was unequivocal. Carbon dioxide concentrations had already reached dangerous levels and called for immediate and ‘very deep’ cuts in the pollution if humanity is to ‘survive’, he told a UN conference in Mauritius.
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Collectively the scientists and assorted experts gathered in Exeter to talk about avoiding dangerous climate change weren’t so obliging. ‘That’s a value judgement to be made by policymakers,’ said Bert Metz of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
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The conference concluded that the risks of global warming were ‘more serious’ than previously thought. ‘Avoiding more serious climate change’ didn’t have quite the same ring. In 2006, Nicholas Stern would be more reliably on-message with forecasts of catastrophes, generating many times the PR impact of the Exeter conference. 

Writing in the
Times of India
later that month, Swaminathan ‘Swami’ Aiyar sounded a note of caution. The best scientific assessment says global warming is happening, ‘yet never in history have scientists accurately predicted what will happen one hundred years later’.
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He had nearly been convinced by photos of the rapid retreat of an Andean glacier publicised by Greenpeace. When Swami visited it, he found others had shown little movement and one glacier had advanced. Greenpeace and other ecological groups had well-intentioned people with high ideals. But as crusaders, ‘they want to win by any means, honest or not. I do not like being taken for a ride, by idealists or anyone else’.
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A month before the Gleneagles G8, the national science academies of the G8 nations plus those of Brazil, China and India issued a joint statement:

The scientific understanding of climate change was sufficiently clear to justify taking prompt action to reduce net global greenhouse gas emissions.
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The academies told the G8 leaders that they should ‘acknowledge that the threat of climate change is clear and increasing’.
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At the beginning of July, the Royal Society published a sixty-page report saying that increased levels of carbon dioxide would cause the oceans to acidify.

Bush was being set up in a pincer movement between the science and the threat of G8 isolation. Although he acknowledged the threat of global warming, he qualified it by reference to the scientific uncertainties, an escape hatch the science academies were trying to close off. ‘Tony Blair is contemplating an unprecedented rift with the US over climate change at the G8 summit next week, which will lead to a final communiqué agreed by seven countries with President George Bush left out on a limb,’ the
Guardian
reported.
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France and Germany preferred an unprecedented split communiqué to a weak one.

According to the report, the US objected to drafting that described climate change as a serious and long-term challenge – wording that got into the final communiqué – and that which said there was strong evidence that ‘significant’ global warming was occurring with human activity contributing to it – wording that did not. The US made a significant concession in accepting that ‘we know enough to act now’ to justify action to stop and then reverse the growth of greenhouse gases.
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Inch by inch, the Bush administration was being cornered into accepting the principle of emissions caps.

If 1988 was global warming’s
annus mirabilis
, 2007 was the
ne plus ultra
, with a concatenation of events culminating in Bali at the year’s end. Australia’s voters obliged, voting out the other Kyoto hold-out. Nature was unbiddable. Observed global temperatures stubbornly showed no discernible upward trend since the turn of the century. 

At the beginning of February 2007, the IPCC released a twenty-page summary of its Fourth Assessment Report. It declared global warming ‘unequivocal’ and human activity its main driver. Compared to the 2001 Third Assessment Report, the IPCC raised its confidence level in its projections from ‘likely’ (meaning sixty-six to ninety percent) to ‘very likely’ (better than ninety per cent), although there exists no empirical means of verifying either the forecasts or the confidence levels surrounding them.

‘February 2nd will be remembered as the date when uncertainty was removed as to whether humans had anything to do with climate change on this planet,’ Achim Steiner, Töpfer’s successor at UNEP, claimed. ‘The evidence is on the table.’
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In reality, the ‘evidence’ was the product of three days and nights of wrangling between teams of government officials from more than a hundred countries and the report’s lead authors, the
New York Times
reported.
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A month later, the EU agreed a 2020 package to cut emissions to eighty per cent of 1990 levels by 2020 and to derive twenty per cent of its energy from renewable sources by the same year. ‘We can avoid what could well be a human calamity,’ said Angela Merkel, chair of the two-day summit.
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Groundbreaking, bold and ambitious, Blair described the deal.
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That was certainly true for Britain and came as a surprise to the rest of the British government. They thought Blair was committing Britain to deriving fifteen per cent of its
electricity
production from renewables, the maximum amount thought possible. Instead Blair committed Britain to fifteen per cent of its total
energy
production, including home heating and transport, from renewables. Sometimes important details slipped Blair when he was after the big picture. He had not known whether the forty-five-minute readiness-for-use claim in the intelligence dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction applied to battlefield or strategic weapons.
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Had Blair made a similar slip at his final EU summit as PM? In 2011, Tony Blair’s office told BBC’s
Panorama
that the decision hadn’t been a gaffe but a decision to protect the environment and help energy security.
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On 24
th
September, the UN convened a high-level meeting in New York. Bush gave it a miss. Arnold Schwarzenegger took centre stage. California was pushing the US beyond debate and doubt to action. The responsibility of all nations was ‘action – action, action, action’.
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The pressure was piling up on Bush, as Britain’s environment minister Hilary Benn made clear. The US had to end its opposition to mandatory caps on emissions. ‘It is inconceivable that dangerous climate change can be avoided without this happening,’ Benn said.
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Among the eighty heads of state and governments, there was a lone dissenting voice – Václav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic. ‘The risk is too small, the costs of eliminating it are too high and the application of a fundamentalistically [sic] interpreted “precautionary principle” is a wrong strategy,’ Klaus told the conference.
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Mingling with other world leaders, several congratulated Klaus for speaking out and said how much they agreed with him.
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In the debates on global warming and environmentalism, Klaus is the anti-Gore. The two are a study in contrasts: Gore, the Southern Baptist preacher invoking the terrors of the Earth if mankind did not repent from its breach with nature, in Bali beseeching delegates to find grace and feel joy; the other, speaking in gentler cadences and the precision of a former econometrician, the central European who had learnt the value of freedom and classical liberalism from its absence in post-war Czechoslovakia.

No other world leader challenged Gore. They first crossed swords in a televised debate in February 1992 during the run-up to the Rio Earth Summit. ‘I disagreed with almost everything he was saying at that time,’ Klaus wrote later.
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Subsequently Klaus described a lecture by Gore as ‘utterly absurd’ and ‘scaremongering’.
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More than his disagreement with the scientific consensus and the economics of the proposed solution, Klaus’s opposition is philosophical. At stake was human freedom. ‘If we take the reasoning of the environmentalists seriously, we find that theirs is an anti-human ideology,’ Klaus wrote in 2008. ‘It sees the fundamental cause of the world’s problems in the very existence of
homo sapiens
.’
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Socialism was no longer the greatest threat to freedom, democracy and the market economy, Klaus argued. It was ‘the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism’.
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Three days after the UN conference, the US hosted a meeting of the sixteen country Major Economies grouping, including seven non-Annex I nations. ‘We’ve come together today because we agree that climate change is a real problem and that human beings are contributing to it,’ secretary of state Condoleezza Rice told the gathering.
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The next morning, President Bush came to the State Department to address the delegates. He looked exhausted, stumbling over the names of the key people in the forthcoming climate conference in Bali. A new approach was needed, Bush said. It should involve the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, developed and developing nations alike:

We will set a long-term goal for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem. And by setting this goal, we commit ourselves to doing something about it.
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His pledge was a substantial concession. It didn’t earn him any applause from the delegates.

What did was Bush’s assurance that the US would advance negotiations under the UN climate change convention. Delegates applauded for opposite reasons. The Europeans were wedded to belief in the efficacy of multilateral institutions. At the UN conference, Angela Merkel had spoken of the centrality of the UN process and called for global emissions to be halved by 2050 – seemingly oblivious that the UN process was incapable of delivering such commitments.
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Non-Annex I delegates applauded because the UN process provided them with the surest guarantee of not having to control their emissions while minimising any political fall-out.

On 12
th
October, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced it was awarding the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly to the IPCC and Al Gore. The committee wanted to

contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind.
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A month later in Valencia, Spain, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon launched the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. ‘Already, it has set the stage for a real breakthrough,’ Ban said. At the UN meeting in September, political leaders had been clear: ‘We cannot afford to leave Bali without such a breakthrough.’
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