The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
Page 53
The heat was headline news. But then heat waves and droughts had always been news. Time magazine, August 1923: “Another heat wave has struck Europe. So hot has it been in the Alps that the great glaciers have been melting and causing avalanches.” Time, June 1934: “Down upon a third of the U.S. poured a blistering sun . . . broiling, baking, burning... Not only was the Midwest as hot as the hinges of Hell. It was also tinder dry.” Time, June 1939: “It was so hot” in London “that ten extra waiters were engaged to serve cooling drinks to perspiring legislator in the House of Commons terrace restaurant . . . The asphalt on Berlin’s Via Triumphalis was so soft that no tanks or cars with caterpillar treads were allowed on the avenue.” Time, August 1955: “In the Eastern U.S., the dreadful summer of 1955 will be remembered for a long time to come . . . the region was withered by drought and a heat wave, the worst on record.”13
But now, from the late 1980s onward, when people wrote about heat waves and droughts, it was not only about their severity and the disruptions and distress they caused, but also about links to carbon dioxide and climate change, and as alarm bells for global warming. In the months that followed, major stories on global warming ran in Time and Newsweek, the major business magazines, and even in Sports Illustrated, whose story was headlined “A Climate for Death.” Global warming had at last found a place in the national consciousness.
Yet as the hot summer of 1988 faded, so did the sense of urgency. Just a couple of days after Bush’s harbor cruise, a science writer at the New York Times sought to sum up the hot summer of 1988. James Hansen’s “signal,” the writer concluded, was not so crystal clear as it might have sounded in the hearing room on June 23. The heat-wave summer of 1988 had turned out to be not the hottest, but only the eleventh hottest in the 58 years that records had been kept. The worst drought was not 1988, but in the Dust Bowl days of 1934, when the upper Midwest was dubbed “the new U.S. Sahara.” The reporter quoted a climate scientist who said, “In the short term, I don’t see any major climate shift in the offing, and I don’t feel we should be packing our bags to move to Manitoba just yet.” When climate change was raised that same month at the U.N. General Assembly, one delegate said that it “still seemed like science fiction to many people.”14
MRS. THATCHER
But one more important, and perhaps surprising, voice on climate change was still to be heard that September. It was that of the first leader of a major industrial nation to deliver a policy address focused on the subject—Britain’s Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher. She was quite taken with the subject, for she was a scientist as a well as politician. With an Oxford degree in chemistry, she had worked for a few years as a research chemist for the J. Lyons food company until deciding that she was more interested in the art of politics than the molecular workings of glycerides monolayers—otherwise known as cake frostings. But her scientific training provided a framework for her to grasp quickly the issues surrounding climate change.
There was also a political element. Two years earlier she had been locked in a battle to the death with the left-wing coal miners’ union, which had sought to cut off the delivery of coal, thus disrupting the nation’s electricity supply and shutting down the country. That struggle was one of the defining moments in her 12 years as prime minister, and her victory broke the stalemate in industrial relations that had been driving Britain into chronic paralysis and economic decline. Replacing coal in electric generation with less-carbon-intensive natural gas from the North Sea would ensure that the coal miners’ union would never again be strong enough to put a hammer lock on the nation’s energy supply and bring its economy to a standstill.15
On September 27, 1988, Thatcher delivered an address to the Royal Society in Fishmongers’ Hall in London in which climate change figured large. Thatcher had assumed that her speech, sounding the tocsin about climate change, would generate much attention. In practical terms, she had counted on that interest to ensure the presence of a bevy of television cameras, so that their bright lights could provide the illumination she needed to read her speech amid the pervasive gloom of the Fishmongers’ Hall. But, to her disappointment, there was little media interest and, to her horror, no television cameras—not a single one. In fact, it was so dark that she was unable to read her speech at all—until, finally, a candelabra was passed up the table.
“For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world’s systems and atmosphere stable,” she said when finally able to begin her speech. “But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agriculture, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the systems of this planet itself.” Although one could not yet be certain, she warned, “we have no laboratory in which to carry out controlled experiments.” As not enough was yet known to make decisions, intensive programs of research and a good deal of “good science” were needed. As good as her word, she upped the British government’s spending on climate research.
But the absence of television cameras certainly indicated that climate change was not yet an issue that would light up the public’s imagination. 16
THE IPCC AND THE “INDISPENSABLE MAN”
But before the year was out, and far from the glare of public attention, the decisive step would be taken that would frame how the world sees climate change today. In November 1988 a group of scientists met in Geneva to inaugurate the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This launch might have been lost in the alphabet soup of international agencies, conferences, and programs, but over the course of the next two decades, it would rise out of obscurity to shape the international discourse on this issue. The IPCC drew its legitimacy from two international organizations, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Development Program. But the IPCC itself was not an organization in any familiar sense. Rather it was a self-regulating, selfgoverning organism, a coordinated network of research scientists who worked across borders, facilitated by cheaper and better communications.
There was certainly a “coordinator in chief ”—a Swedish meteorologist named Bert Bolin. If one man was at the center of the growing international climate work, and would be there for almost half a century, year in and year out, it was Bolin—the “indispensable man” of climate research. Bolin was convener, keynoter, conference chair, editor, writer, adjudicator, balancer, scientific statesman, and international policy entrepreneur. He had started as a mathematician focused on atmospheric circulation. In the 1950s he had worked at Princeton with John von Neumann and Jule Charney, helping to write equations for those first computerized weather predictions. Back home in Sweden he had switched to geochemistry and become expert on carbon dioxide and the carbon cycle. As one research committee and conference begat another, which in turn begat another, which begat still another, the list of acronyms grew ever longer—and longer. Bolin seemed not only to be part of virtually all of them, but he also had no trouble keeping straight the otherwise incomprehensible jargon. As he wrote with great fluidity in his quasi-memoir, “As chairman of the CAS I submitted to ICSU a report for careful and urgent consideration by IUGG and ICSU and transmitted it to WMO which cosponsored the study conference and necessarily had to play an important role in the future planning and organization of GARP.”17
Although plans for the IPCC were formally hatched in the spring of 1988, Hansen’s testimony and the Toronto Conference alarmed Bolin. He believed that the evidence had to be carefully evaluated, and that policy should not get ahead of what was known. As Bolin, the artful consensus builder, expressed it, “An intense debate amongst scientists followed” Hansen’s testimony, “and most of them disagreed strongly with Hansen’s statement. The data showing the global increase of temperature had not been scrutinized and there was insufficient evidence that extreme events had become more common. This was to me a clear warning of how chaotic a debate between scientists and the pu
blic might become, if a much more stringent approach to the assessment of available knowledge was not instituted.” He was similarly worried about the “unrealistic ad-hoc recommendation” about cutting carbon coming out of the Toronto conference. As he put it with a certain understatement, “The need for another, more trustworthy, assessment was very obvious.”
Through workshops, papers, dialogue, reviews—and more reviews and still more reviews—the IPCC would seek to understand what was known about climate in all its manifestations, and what was uncertain. The days of the Tyndalls and the Keelings—individual atmospheric scientists, working on their own—were over. Science was now a multifaceted, cross-disciplinary, multinational enterprise. Yet when it came to climate, Bert Bolin was at the center of it all.
The fuse for the first IPCC report was short. It had to be ready by 1990, in time for the United Nations General Assembly. One of the preparatory meetings, held in Washington, D.C., was opened by James Baker, giving his very first speech as secretary of state. In it he called for a “no regrets” policy on climate change—which meant that the international community, even if not sure, should take actions that would be prudential in case the risks turned out to be real. Bolin was happy to hear Baker’s speech but thought it was “premature to rush into an action program.”18
SHOOT-OUT AT SUNDSVALL
All sorts of obstacles stood in the way of getting the work done. In late August 1990, as the deadline for preparation of the report for the U.N. General Assembly approached, scientists and policymakers met in the northern Swedish town of Sundsvall. A week of acrimonious negotiations ensued, with enormous frustrating arguments even about individual words. What, for instance, did “safe” really mean? By Friday afternoon there was still no agreement. And without agreement they could not go to the United Nations General Assembly with concrete recommendations.
Then came the epic crisis that threatened to scuttle the entire IPCC process: At 6:00 p.m. the U.N. translators walked off the job. They had come to the end of their working day and they were not going to work overtime. This was nonnegotiable. Those were their work rules. But without translators the delegates could not communicate among themselves, the meeting could not go on, there would be no report to the General Assembly and no resolution on climate change. But then the French chairman of the session, who had insisted on speaking French all week, made a huge concession. He agreed to switch to English, in which, it turned out, he was exceedingly fluent.
The discussions and debates now continued in English, and progress was laboriously made. But the chief Russian delegate sat silent, angrily scowling, wreathed in cigarette smoke. Without his assent, there would be no final report, and he gave no sign of coming on board.
Finally one of the scientists from the American delegation who happened to speak Russian approached the scientist. He made a stunning discovery. The Russian did not speak English, and he was certainly not going to sign on to something he did not understand. The American scientist turned himself into a translator, and the Russian finally agreed to the document. Thus consensus was wrought. The IPCC was rescued—just in time.19
So it was that, in October 1990, the IPCC was able to deliver its First Assessment Report to the United Nations. It answered the fundamental question by stating unequivocally: The earth was warming. But was it man-made? The warming, it said, was “broadly consistent with the predictions of climate models” regarding “larger man-made greenhouse warming.” But the problem was that it was also broadly consistent with “natural climate variability.” It would take another “decade or more” for “the unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations.” So, said Bert Bolin’s first IPCC, it was too soon to say whether man was causing the warming.
But that left a very big risk on the table. “By the time that question was clarified,” said Bolin, “the commitment to future climate change will be considerably larger than today”—and it would be that much harder to deal with.20
GETTING READY FOR RIO
In response to the first IPCC report, the United Nations General Assembly had called for an international agreement—a “convention”—to limit greenhouse gases, primarily CO2. It was supposed to be ready for a future Earth Summit, officially known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, which would be held in Rio. What was to ensue was a complex, highly contentious international negotiating process that proved to be a cliffhanger until the very end.
For the first time, developing nations were seriously involved in climate discussions. But the last thing they wanted was limits on carbon emissions that would constrain their energy use and thus economic growth. Industrial nations were responsible for most of the human-released carbon in the atmosphere; they had been burning coal, oil, and natural gas for a very long time. It was their carbon; they were responsible for the problem, and they should be the ones to pay for fixing it. Why should the developing countries be denied their chance to grow? The developing nations vehemently opposed putting another issue on the agenda—deforestation, which also releases copious CO2. That too could constrain their freedom of action and development.
The developed nations were bitterly split. Many—principally European—sought specific timetables and targets to reduce emissions. In their view there was no time to waste. Others wanted to proceed, but more slowly, with more caveats, and not with specific targets. There was much too much uncertainty, and they certainly did not want, especially during the recession years of the early 1990s, to put their own economic prospects at further risk.
The latter was the position of the United States—more or less. For the Bush administration itself was divided on the issue. Climate change had moved from science to the world of policy. The struggle within the Bush administration would become a paradigm for the climate debate over the decades that followed.
TO GO OR NOT TO GO
Would he, or wouldn’t he? That was the question. Would President George H. W. Bush go to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992? Or would he stay home? As he had promised, he had brought greenhouse gases into the White House. But the “ White House effect” was not quite what had been intended. For those gases had inflamed a torrid battle within his administration.
William Reilly, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, had been worrying about climate change for a decade, going back to his days as head of the Conservation Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund. He strongly argued for targets and, even more strongly, argued that Bush had to go to Rio. For him, Bush’s 1988 promise to bring greenhouse gases into the White House was “highly significant.” The president had said it; it was administration policy; and, as Reilly put it, “I dined out on it all the time.”
Others in the administration, however, told the president that carbon restrictions would put the economy, already in recession, at “enormous risk.” The chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers warned that the president might be making a “bet your economy” decision. This was the beginning of what continues today as the debate over the costs of adapting to climate change. The opponents of Bush’s going emphasized the uncertainty and lack of sufficient evidence of temperature change to support the global-warming thesis. Sophisticated computer models were, in the eyes of the critics within the administration, still just models. Moreover, the IPCC itself had said human agency was not yet proved, and so how could targets be imposed? Some also saw the climate issue as a shift in tone from “red” to “green” in the opposition to capitalism and the market system—or, as one critic put it, “a green tree with red roots.”21
The leading opponent within the administration was John Sununu, the White House chief of staff. During his three terms as governor of New Hampshire, Sununu had battled antinuclear activists over the Seabrook nuclear power plant, in what has been described as “one of the country’s bitterest nuclear power fights.” He now regarded the climate change activists as part of the same “anti-growth, anti-development crowd.” In
deed, to him they were cut from the same mold as the1972 Club of Rome Report, whose model-driven scenarios had famously—and wrongly—predicted that economic growth would soon be snuffed out by overpopulation and shortages of natural resources.
Sununu was also a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT. “I made a living out of models before I went into politics, and you can get whatever results you want,” he later said. “If people think these models have any validity, they are out of their minds.” He questioned the feedbacks and observed that the failure to include the oceans in the models at the time was a serious shortcoming. Sununu supported substantial increases in funding for climate research but took the lead in the administration challenging the premise of climate change—and argued most vigorously against Bush’s going to Rio.22