Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming

6. The IPCC and the Primacy of Science

147 6 The IPCC and the Primacy of Science In March of 1988, global atmospheric CO2 oscillated through 352 ppm on its way to its May peak, this time at 354 ppm. With little fanfare, the Keeling Curve had turned thirty. For three decades, the Mauna Loa Observatory had collected and compiled measurements of atmospheric CO2 that, when graphed by monthly mean over time, showed a 10 percent increase in the gas over that time period. In 1988, those 357 monthly averages had clearly taken the shape of the now-familiar undulating, upward-sloping curve associated with global warming. Annual oscillations —​ iterations of a story of planetary respiration—​ taken together constituted a larger secular trend in CO2 , the greenhouse gas most associated with the increasingly alarming issue of global warming. The primary structures of the history of global warming had also begun to take shape by 1988. The impacts of rising CO2 had not yet begun to appear, but the story already had the markings of tragedy. The sciencefirst advocacy that scientists and environmentalists developed to combat global warming had failed to achieve meaningful political or environmental objectives. In fact, the top-down, science-first approach had actually begun to undermine these objectives by leaving scientists vulnerable to political change. In 1988, a new iteration of the CO2 story institutionalized this sciencefirst approach to advocacy at the international level in the form of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The IPCC represented the apotheosis of the “forcing function of knowledge,” a self-conscious 148 | Chapter 6 attempt to create a scientific consensus on climate change upon which to base international policy. The IPCC itself was also the product of a related set of iterative stories. Scientists and their associates in the United Nations modeled the IPCC on the remarkably successful efforts to tackle two other problems of the global atmosphere in the 1980s: acid rain and ozone depletion . The relationship among acid rain, ozone, and CO2 was deeply problematic , however, and understanding how the effort to combat these two other environmental problems reinforced the primacy of science in global warming discourse is central to the larger tragedy of global warming. The Vienna-Montreal Process For environmentalists, acid rain presented a much more familiar set of problems than did either ozone depletion or global warming. Though newly pressing at a global scale, it was not a new issue. In an 1872 book called Air and Rain: The Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology, the English chemist Angus Smith described the influence of airborne matter from coal combustion and the decomposition of organic matter as “acid rain,” noting its effect on the chemistry of rainwater throughout the English, Scottish, and German countrysides.1 In the 1950s, limnologists, agricultural scientists, and atmospheric chemists took up the issue as part of independent efforts to expand basic research within each discipline. By the late 1960s, the Swede Svante Oden had begun to incorporate these studies in a developing hypothesis that linked the causes of acid rain—​ industrial emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2 ), nitrogen oxides (NOx , often pronounced “nox”), and other chemicals—​ with the phenomenon’s environmental and public health impacts.2 Oden demonstrated that European SO2 emissions adversely affected Scandinavian plant growth, freshwater fish populations, and overall water quality. His work was part of what prompted Sweden’s leadership in the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in 1972.3 Oden’s studies of acid rain helped to illuminate the potential geographical disparity between the sources and impacts of pollutants like SO2 and NOx . As with global warming, the issue required new thinking about transboundary environmental governance, both in Europe and in North America. As early as 1970, the Nixon administration considered levying a tax on SO2 tied to energy production from coal.4 Agreements The IPCC and the Primacy of Science | 149 between European nations and negotiations between the United States and Canada yielded first bilateral treaties and eventually the more broadly international U.N. Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution , proposed in 1979 and ratified in 1983. As Natural Resources Defense Council and World Resources Institute founder Gus Speth remembers, the long-distance impacts of these pollutants on agriculture, species and their habitats, and water quality challenged environmentalists to think about air pollution as more than just a local, urban problem.5 Legally, however, acid rain was little more than a variation on a theme, and American environmental...