The Age of Global Warming: A History

by Rupert Darwall

  We got department stores and toilet paper

  Got Styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer

  Neil Young sang in his 1989 ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’: ‘Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.’ Britain experienced its Second Summer of Love, a return to the psychedelic 1960s with acid-fuelled rave parties and protests against road-building. Environmentalism needed ringing tills and gridlocked roads.

  Global warming’s arrival in the world was announced with a blaze of fanfares heralding potential catastrophe. Alarmism went hand-in-hand with predictions of temperature increases that turned out to be excessive. Although warnings that civilisation was doomed because economic activity was destroying the biosphere had become something of a routine, two things were different this time. First, mainstream political leaders from across the political spectrum quickly joined and amplified the chorus. Second, an institutional apparatus was constructed to keep attention on the issue. Unlike the 1972 Stockholm conference and the creation of the UNEP far away from the centres of power, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was an inter-governmental body with close and pervasive relations with its sponsoring governments. The rhythm of the publication of IPCC assessment reports would help feed media interest and keep governments engaged.

  And there was something else. It wasn’t just one event. It was many. It was in the air.

  Four days before Hansen’s Senate appearance, the G7 summit in Toronto declared that ‘global climate change, air, sea and fresh water pollution, acid rain, hazardous substances, deforestation, and endangered species require priority attention’.[3] Climate change had first been mentioned in the 1985 Bonn summit, but the Toronto G7 went further. Canada had been the first western nation to support the Brundtland Report and host Brian Mulroney wanted to make sure environmental protection and the Brundtland Report were on the summit agenda.[4]

  The summit noted that the Brundtland Report’s call that environmental considerations should be integrated into all areas of economic policymaking for the globe to continue to support humankind and formally endorsed ‘the concept of sustainable development’.[5] It had taken seventeen years from Founex to sustainable development being adopted by the G7. It was environmentalism’s greatest international triumph up to that point.

  Why did Ronald Reagan at his last G7 summit and Margaret Thatcher, then the longest-serving G7 leader, give their approval to a political doctrine that holds as its axiom that markets keep people in the developing world poor and devastate the environment? The answer is clearer with Thatcher. But there is little to suggest Reagan had changed his views. Most likely, sustainable development had been an issue the top levels of the administration had not considered that important. The first item on the summit communiqué had been the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and managing the de-escalation of the Cold War to a peaceful close.*

  In his final year as president, Reagan continued to resist environmental regulations he thought might harm American economic interests. Earlier in 1988, Mulroney had visited Washington to push the Reagan administration into signing a treaty on acid rain. Reagan and secretary of state George Shultz ignored Mulroney’s pleas, although Mulroney’s meeting with Vice President Bush produced a promise that he would, a pledge that he kept after he became president. As Mulroney put it in his memoirs, ‘unlike his decisive actions in East-West relations and other important international issues, Ronald Reagan, as I was to find out in April in Washington, was unable to fully seize the moment’.[6]

  Eight days after the G7, Mulroney hosted a second Toronto conference. Organised by Gro Harlem Brundtland and Jim MacNeill, it was on global warming and its implications for global security. The language at the conference was alarmist, as were the temperature forecasts. The dangers from the growth of greenhouse gases were second only to nuclear war. Harmful consequences were already evident over many parts of the globe, although it wasn’t specified where these were or what they might be. Severe economic and social dislocation for present and future generations was predicted.

  Average global temperatures were forecast to rise by between 1.5oC and 4.5oC before the middle of the twenty-first century.[7] By 2009, one third of the way into 1988–2050 forecast period, average global temperatures, according to Britain’s Hadley/Met Office temperature series, had risen by just over one quarter of a degree centigrade (0.257oC) compared to the half-degree rise implied by the lower band assumed by the Toronto conference. The top of the forecast band is way off the scale – out by a factor of nearly six.[8]

  The Toronto climate conference did make one correct forecast, anticipating the pattern of recommendations that should be adopted to combat global warming. Calling for a rapid reduction in North-South inequalities, the conference said that total emissions of carbon dioxide should be cut twenty per cent below their 1988 level by 2005, with all the cuts falling on the rich nations. Additional energy consumption by developing nations should be met by even steeper reductions on the part of the developed world. At some stage, rapid economic growth by developing nations implied that developed countries would have to cut their carbon emissions to less than zero.

  In September came a powerful voice from an unexpected quarter. Echoing Revelle and Suess in their 1957 paper, Margaret Thatcher warned humans might have ‘unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the planet itself’.[9] Global warming now had a political champion of undoubted world stature. ‘We are told,’ although she didn’t say by whom, ‘that a warming of one degree centigrade per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope,’ she said in her speech to the Royal Society. Such a rapid rise might indeed have been a cause for alarm. The degree-per-decade rise alluded to by Mrs Thatcher implied that by 2010, the planet would have warmed a full two degrees centigrade compared to the 1.8oC to 4.0oC range predicted by the IPCC in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report to the end of the twenty-first century.[10]

  Two months later in Geneva, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change met for the first time. Mustafa Tolba, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, asked Bert Bolin to be the IPCC’s first chairman. An independent-minded meteorologist and sometime scientific adviser to Sweden’s prime minister, Bolin was clear what the IPCC needed to do. It should provide a stringent assessment of the available scientific knowledge he thought had been lacking thus far. Bolin spared neither supporters nor opponents of anthropogenic global warming from criticism, whether it was Hansen’s congressional testimony (‘the data showing the global increase of temperature had not been scrutinised well enough’); the forecasts adopted by the Toronto climate conference (‘not yet been generally accepted by the scientific community’) or Mrs Thatcher (‘seriously misinformed’ on the scale of the warming effect).[11]

  Bolin’s opinions were not limited to scientific matters. He thought Mrs Thatcher’s interest in global warming was motivated by a desire to close Britain’s coal mines.[12] More importantly, his opinions on the economics and politics of global warming, which would become a large part of the IPCC’s work, were coloured by his belief in sustainable development. For Bolin the scientist, there was no boundary demarcating the positivist world of science and the clash of normative values that characterises political debate. Writing of the IPCC’s work in developing policies to combat global warming, Bolin said, ‘striving for sustainable development and an equitable world must be central features of any study of this kind’.[13]

  In his role as IPCC chairman Bolin adjudicated technical disputes far outside his field of expertise. For example, he opposed the use of Purchasing Power Parity indices (used to compare GDP across frontiers) in the IPCC’s economic scenarios because he (wrongly) thought they made assumptions incompatible with ‘the basic goal of a future equitable world.’[14] From the outset, the IPCC and its first chairman were not going to limit themselves to diagnosis; they were going to set the parameters for the cure as well. P
oliticisation of the IPCC’s work was not an incidental risk that needed to be managed; it was inherent in the mandate the IPCC had devised for itself and Bert Bolin’s expansive view of it.

  The Geneva meeting also established IPCC’s tripartite working group structure which has persisted to the present day; Working Group I to assess the available evidence, led initially by Sir John Houghton of Britain’s Meteorological Office; Working Group II to assess the environmental and socio-economic impacts, led by Dr Yuri Izrael of the USSR’s Hydro-Meteorological Service; and Working Group III to formulate response strategies, led by Dr Frederick Bernthal of the US State Department – and thought the most important of the three.

  Twenty years to the day after his 1988 testimony, Hansen gave a reprise. ‘Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding ninety-nine per cent,’ Hansen testified.[15] There were already present, Hansen stated, the elements of a ‘perfect storm’ and a ‘global cataclysm’. Even without further greenhouse gas emissions, the Arctic would soon be ice-free during summer. If emissions followed a business-as-usual scenario, Hansen claimed there would be two metre sea level rises by the end of the century and hundreds of millions of refugees. His call for the chief executives of oil and coal companies to be tried for ‘high crimes against humanity and nature’ caught the media’s attention, as such inflammatory language was designed to do.[16]

  It also had the effect of diverting media scrutiny from other problematic aspects of Hansen’s testimony. While complaining of a ‘wide gap’ between what the scientific community knew and the public believed, there was a widening gap Hansen was less keen to talk about – that between his 1988 temperature forecasts and what actually happened.

  In his 1988 testimony, Hansen had presented long-term temperature projections based on three scenarios for future emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. These ranged from scenario A, which Hansen described as ‘business as usual’ through an intermediate scenario B to scenario C, which he described as illustrating the impact of ‘draconian emission cuts’ resulting in no net addition to concentration of greenhouse gases from 2000, i.e., by then, man-made emissions would be completely absorbed by natural sinks.[17]

  Because Hansen’s team over-forecast the growth of other greenhouse gases apart from carbon dioxide, Hansen’s intermediate scenario B provided the best fit with actual emissions, but not, interestingly, with the trend in global temperatures. By 2008, the trend in observed temperatures was well below scenario B and, in some cases, below even that for scenario C. Of Hansen’s three scenarios, his temperature increase projections for scenario C provide the best fit with observed temperatures.[18]

  The message that the world didn’t hear from Hansen’s presentation was that it was getting the temperatures assumed by Hansen’s no net emissions scenario without incurring any of its costs. Such a conclusion would have been consistent with the data, but would have undermined Hansen’s characterisation of the ‘global warming time bomb’ and demolished his claim of a better than ninety-nine per cent certainty.

  Unlike the blanket TV coverage Hansen generated at his 1988 appearance, there were no cameras when Mrs Thatcher addressed the Royal Society on 27th September 1988. Told that the prime minister’s speech was going to be on climate change, the BBC decided it wouldn’t make the TV news.[19]

  The speech had been a long time in the making. Flying back from visiting President Mitterrand in Paris in May 1984, Mrs Thatcher asked her officials if any of them had any new policy ideas for the forthcoming G7 summit in London. Sir Crispin Tickell, then a deputy undersecretary at the Foreign Office, suggested climate change and how it might figure in the G7 agenda. The next day, Tickell was summoned to Number 10 to brief the Prime Minister. The eventual result was to make environmental problems a specific item, and a statement in the London G7 communiqué duly referred to the international dimension of environmental problems and the role of environmental factors, including climate change. Environment ministers were instructed to report back to the G7 meeting at Bonn the following year, and duly did so.[20]

  Tickell’s interest in climate change dated from the mid 1970s. Influenced by reading Hubert Lamb’s book Climate History and the Modern World, Tickell took the opportunity of a one-year fellowship at Harvard to study the relationship between climate change and world affairs and wrote a book on the subject in 1977. Tickell recalls that people at the time thought his interest in the topic a bit eccentric, but he was the only non-American to have participated in the Carter administration’s Global 2000 project.

  By 1987, Tickell had been appointed Britain’s ambassador to the UN and informally was acting as Thatcher’s envoy on global warming, his position at the UN making him privy to gossip from other nations.[21] On two occasions, Thatcher recalled him from New York to brief her. Tickell was always struck by her determined approach; in the world of politics, Thatcher was a woman in a man’s world and someone with scientific training in a non-scientific world.[22] To meet the test, you had to know what you were talking about; if she challenged you, you needed to be sure of your ground; she could be remarkably vigorous, Tickell found. The prime minister wanted the government to grasp the importance of global warming. Ministers were called to Number 10 for briefings by climate scientists. ‘You are to listen, not to speak,’ the prime minister told them.[23]

  Returning to England for his summer holiday in 1988, Tickell called on Thatcher and suggested she make a major speech on global warming. She thought the Royal Society would be the perfect forum for it. She spent two weekends working on the draft with George Guise, one of her policy advisers.

  In the speech, Thatcher addressed the Society as a scientist and a Fellow who happened to be prime minister. Environment policy was her main subject. Action to cut power station emissions and reduce acid rain was being undertaken ‘at great and necessary expense’, she said, building up to her main theme. ‘The health of the economy and the health of the environment are totally dependent on each other,’ implicitly rejecting the view of conventional economics of there being a trade-off between resources used for environmental protection which couldn’t be used to raise output or increase consumption.[24] It was also clear that the G7’s endorsement of sustainable development had not been an oversight or meant to be taken lightly, as far as she was concerned. ‘The government espouses the concept of sustainable economic development,’ she stated, although the new policy had not been discussed collectively by ministers beforehand or with Nigel Lawson, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.[25]

  Thatcher concluded her speech by referring to one of the most famous events in the Royal Society’s history, when in 1919 Arthur Eddington displayed the photographic plates taken during the total eclipse of the sun earlier that year. The eclipse enabled Eddington to record whether light from distant stars was bent by the sun’s gravity and verify a prediction of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

  Whitehead witnessed Eddington’s demonstration. The scene, tense as a Greek drama, he wrote, was played out beneath the portrait of Isaac Newton, the Society’s twelfth president, ‘to remind us that the greatest of scientific generalisations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its first modification’.[26] In Vienna, reports of it thrilled the seventeen-year-old Karl Popper. What particularly impressed Popper was the risk implied by Einstein’s theory, that light from distant stars would be deflected by the Sun’s mass, because it could be subjected to a definitive test: ‘If observation shows that the predicted effect is definitely absent, then the theory is simply refuted. The theory is incompatible with certain possible results of observation – in fact with results which everybody before Einstein would have expected.’[27]

  These considerations led Popper to argue that the criterion for assessing the scientific status of a theory should be its capacity to generate predictions that could, in principle, be refuted by empirical evidence, what Popper called its falsi
fiability, or refutability, or testability.[28] Every ‘good’ scientific theory is a prohibition. The more a theory forbids, the better it is. Scientists should therefore devise tests designed to yield evidence that the theory prohibits, rather than search for what the theory confirms. If we look for them, Popper argued, it is easy to find confirmations for nearly every theory. ‘Only a theory which asserts or implies that certain conceivable events will not, in fact, happen is testable,’ Popper explained in a lecture in 1963. ‘The test consists in trying to bring about, with all the means we can muster, precisely these events which the theory tells us cannot occur.’[29]

  In 1988, proponents of global warming did not provide a similar black and white predictive test of the key proposition of global warming: the degree of warming with increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is therefore incapable of being falsified. The issue is not the capacity of carbon dioxide to absorb radiation in a test tube, which had first been demonstrated by John Tyndall in 1859, but the effect of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on the temperature of the atmosphere. An answer can only be derived from empirical observation.

  Revelle and Suess’s characterisation of mankind carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment, further illustrates global warming’s weakness as a scientific statement and its strength as a political idea. While prejudging the results of an experiment constitutes bad science, the proposition simultaneously generates powerful calls to halt the experiment before it is concluded. Yet questioning the science would inevitably be seen as weakening the political will to act. It created a symbiotic dependence between science and politics that marks 1988 as a turning point in the history of science and the start of a new chapter in the affairs of mankind.