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Annual Conference of RMNO : Disaster, Failure or Success? – by Dr. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, Reader, Department of Geography, Tel: (0)1482 465349/6341/5385
Outline
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change I
have been asked about the strong and weak points in the functioning of the
IPCC. As an academic I am
trained to find weak points, alas; but I think that IPCC supporters, and
there are very many, are well able to blow their own trumpets. Let me
therefore concentrate on what I, as a policy analyst, consider the weak
points. I stress that my loyalty lies not with research but with policy as
it affects human beings alive today. I note that in Europe at least, the
IPCC has been instrumental in moving a significant amounts of tax payers
money to a small elite of research institutions and disciplines. I am best
informed about the policy role played by IPCC statements and leaders in
the UK. The IPCC is not a single body, rather it is a label for scientific
reports and summaries that give advise to governments: on the state of
scientific knowledge, on the impacts of various ‘projections’ based on
socio-economic scenarios (IPCC language) or
‘predictions’ (IPCC user terminology) and
on ‘responses’ . The latter is primarily about ‘mitigation’, that
is the advocacy of solutions
to a problem that is still being studied! It is important to note this
structure when making any assessment. The
IPCC was set up when fossil fuel prices collapsed and new/green and
alternative energy technologies and fuel, including nuclear power, needed
official help to survive, and the EU institutions wanted to increase their
competencies in this area. Authoritative science would give ‘sound’
advice: sound meaning that its words could be so interpreted as to say
what governments (and environmentalists) wanted
to hear. If the views of scientists differed seriously those of these two,
as far as I am aware, they were not effectively disseminated. In addition,
the research agenda of the WMO and IGBP (Earth
Systems science) were well funded on the basis of the claim that
science would enable global environmental management and sustainability.
Virtual problems would be postulated and explored, while real, existing
environmental problems and conflicts were neglected. One
example of the latter: TAR itself, in a draft version I received, said: “The allocation of emissions in a scenario is coupled closely to an
important policy question in climate negotiations, the distribution of
future emissions rights among nations, or ‘burden sharing’. It is noteworthy that this is
usually not explicitly treated in mitigation scenarios….." How
can ‘we’ (and who is we if not unelected but
selected experts?), given our profound ignorance of the future,
distribute emission rights today thereby likely to entrench a specific
distribution of power, knowledge and technologies? Isn’t this, once you think about
it as a historian, a monstrous attempt at global and national control? Nazi ‘Gleichschaltung’ might
be liberal in comparison. And if you find this comment offensive, let me
remind you of the ‘convergence’ debate which appears to postulate that
every individual, or is it country per capita?, should be given an equal
allocation of emission
rights. How
is this to be done if not by extreme compulsion? WG III admits that the
politics related to IPCC action proposal are not even made explicit and
research into these is certainly not funded. It is my view, that what some
governments considered important for the Kyoto process had little to do with environmental
protection and more with energy policy, bureaucratic competence,
technology forcing and income generation for governments, and the IPCC was
therefore needed, and used, to underwrite these agendas. Many other motives were attracted to the global warming
agenda and were able to hide behind the dangerous warming threat that for
policy and legal purposes has
to be man-made and subject to
controls by technology policy and interventions in the price system. Within these boundaries, the IPCC
leadership has done a wonderful job, written many well illustrated reports
and even more most carefully drafted Summaries for Policy Makers,
containing many weasel words delighting a person interested in the
diplomatic use of language. The
IPCC has two functions that are not necessarily consistent: ·
* a structure
for selecting and publishing scientific reports considered relevant by
lead authors, and ·
* source of
policy advice from a much smaller group of officials and experts who
condense and select from the above policy relevant material it considers
worthy of dissemination to policy-makers and the public. So
one can distinguish between what the reports say, what the policy maker
summaries indicate, and what the ‘users’ make of either or both. I am
arguing that for the research enterprise, at least in some countries, the
IPCC has primarily been an instrument for attracting funding for the
research agendas of its
‘communities’. By asserting policy relevance IPCC related research has
been so well funded in Europe that the USA modellers now claim that they
have been left behind. President Bush is said to have put more funds their
way.[1] Giving the dependence of much
climate change research on direct official funding, and the receiving of
such on membership of established (and conservative)
research networks, its leaders could not behave as a policy neutral
advisory body simply. They have not simply presented the evidence and
theories nicely wrapped to ‘policy-makers’, as its the official view.
They have become advocates of policy, if only research for more research
and R&D. This is not an attack on the integrity of climate scientists
as a group, but a statement of fact deduced from political reality
supported by personal observation. The IPCC is a political actor, though
this role is not uniform, and it is a difficult role. I
have done specific research in the IPCC in the early 1990s and have
watched it ever since. I interpret the IPCC, as far as its advisory
capacity is concerned, as a mixed group of self-selected believers and
officially selected experts, most of them paid directly by governments,
who do not, indeed cannot, give entirely honest advice. Much influence is
in the hands of official experts, many of them paid by governments
directly for promoting what they advocate and who must have difficulty in
distinguishing between belief, wishful thinking and what is actually
known. Precaution directs
ever more technology research agendas towards ‘decarbonisation’, but
is this really a global need? The experts are too close to policy and
funding commitments not to act strategically, and are clearly troubled by
this difficult role. The FCCC biases the research agenda towards the
discovery of harm. Climate is not well enough understood to give advise on
how to respond to ‘discernible’, perhaps’, anthropogenic, perhaps,
climatic change that will do great harm to mankind, perhaps. Too many of the solutions proposed
are the products of futuristic academic research rather than realistic
politics. The
IPCC was set up to advise governments not just on science but also on what
to do, on policy ‘options’. The research enterprise in fact offered
its advice to governments in the mid 1980s when governments themselves
became very interested in regulating energy policy. Engineering research already knew
what could be or even ought to be done (energy
efficiency, alternative energy sources, nuclear power, later …emission
trading), and many governments realised that they would also
benefit from this agenda. As
the FCCC negotiations continued with their ups and downs, the IPCC became
a highly political and politicised body (and here I
do not mean party political but political in the sense of being subjected as well as
sensitive to interests, including its own). I am sure that many of its
‘bench’ contributors are not aware of this and would not have cared
anyway. The Panel’s leadership, however, may well have been too close to
some governments, especially in Europe where green ministries have funded policy relevant rather
than basic science. Does one
build a sounder base for a decision, if scientists focus too early on
‘policy’ when that which is to be managed remain but partially
understood? The
Panel no longer provides a scientific consensus underpinning the FCCC,
which is a common formulation of its task, but - to quote from the Cambridge
University Press release for TAR (addressed to
‘Dear Scientist’) - delivers ‘authoritative,
international consensus of scientific opinion on climate change’,
(emphasis added). This opinion,
presented with many caveats that are nevertheless readily presented as
fact, has greatly influenced
policy , e.g. the then UK Environment Minister John Gummer[2],
told the whole world that : “We have a clear message from
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that global climate change
needs global action now” (UK,2nd
Report under the FCCC, 1997: 3) The message I see is not that clear and becomes
less clear the further one moves away from atmospheric modelling. However,
the Kyoto process would collapse, if the IPCC were to agree with Sallie L.
Baliunas in a recent article with James K. Glassman: "Without
computer models, there would be no evidence of global warming, (man-made, that is), no Kyoto.
By simulating the climate on giant, ultra-fast computers, scholars try to
find out how it will react to each new stimulus - like a doubling of CO2.
An ideal computer model, however, would have to track five million
parameters over the surface of the earth and through the atmosphere, and
incorporate all relevant interactions among land, sea, air, ice and
vegetation. According to one researcher, such a model would demand ten
million trillion degrees of freedom to solve a computational impossibility even on the most advanced
supercomputer." [3] I would expect that all
scientists, indeed researchers as seekers after truth have a problem with
demand for scientific consensus, or even consensus of scientific opinion,
being sought from still highly active research bodies and competing
hypotheses, especially on something as complex as climate.[4] Why not send policy-makers -before
they have made policy - to look at the available information and then
advise their politicians? While reaching such consensus may be a necessary
evil and better than no input from scientists at all, the outcome is not a
‘scientific’ but a political, negotiated, consensus. [5]science,
where relevant, consensus should emerge over time from fundamental studies
and is not negotiated with government representatives who may later make
‘science’ responsible for their policies, especially when these fail.
Here is a description of how it is generated. In the words of a colleague,
Richard Courtney, who recently observed the latest IPCC meeting when the
Synthesis Report was agreed: ‘The purpose was to provide a Report that integrates information from the summaries of the recent reports from the three IPCC Working Groups. The Lead Authors had provided a Draft Text for the Synthesis Report and governments had provided comments on it. The Lead Authors had then revised the Draft in attempt to incorporate those comments. The Meeting ploughed through the revised Draft and approved - or amended before approving - each sentence of it. In the event of disagreement the Chairman convened a small informal meeting called a Contact Group. Any government representatives could attend a Contact Group that would hopefully decide a sentence the Plenary would accept. Only governments were permitted to input any information or comment to the Plenary and Contact Groups…[6] Only sentences that were agreed by every government were included in the Report. Objection by any one government was sufficient to have a sentence excluded or modified - often, other phrasings would be sought. I would also comment here that given this rule, it is somewhat hard to
understand how IPCC can be seen as a cutting edge organisation in saying
anything…....National interests clearly motivated inputs to the
meeting…The IPCC Synthesis Report is a very political document. The UK,
US, Germany and Saudi Arabia made about half of all contributions to the
Plenary between them. ….In this sea level debate, as in several others,
it was repeatedly stated that the "message" must be helpful to
policy makers. But, in my
opinion, the method for achieving this desire was very wrong. The "message" was
clearly a single, one-sided view of the issues that was agreed by all the
governments. Absence of
complete agreement prevented inclusion of any statement. This resulted in, for example, exclusion of the complexity of sea level change mechanisms from
the text. Hence, the
Synthesis Report is a document of agreed governmental policy and not a
complete assessment of the science. Scientists
are not one handed…. The
mentioned TAR is rather honest, however. It does not claim that the
reports by the IPCC are about ‘climate’, but about climate change,
which is an artificial construct based on some science and huge
computational power and lots of global data sets and speculations about
the future of mankind. In
these areas the IPCC is certainly authoritative and has done a splendid
job, thanks to good funding for its glossy publications. The IPCC Working Groups The
natural scientists set up Working Group I to ‘underpin’ the FCCC.
Without the belief that global warming is happening, is globally dangerous
(as laid down in the FCCC and studied in WG II)
and is indeed caused by human energy use that can be effectively altered,
neither the FCCC nor the Kyoto Protocol would make environmental sense.
Moving away from fossil fuels may make political and economic sense for some actors, but not
globally. WG
II on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability[7] deals with the potential nasty impacts of
warming - whatever its causes really - and makes pretty gloomy predictions
about the global hothouse, especially when policy makers, including UNEP
needed such pronouncements. WG II has not really looked at the benefits of
warming, this would be against the treaty and belief system they are meant
to serve. People really need regional climate change predictions (IPCC projections have a tendency to be turned into
prediction by users and do so unchallenged), and a lot of research
is going on in this area. But how true are the predictions/projections
given what goes into the models? WG III (Mitigation) thrives on political and economic
motivations created by gloomy ‘projections’ : mitigation research and
even more so its practical realisation requires for subsidies and
regulatory interventions. Without fear of catastrophe, the money needed
for the development of solutions may be spent elsewhere.[8]
As do the many tasks and
responsibilities for bureaucracies, especially for what are called
‘vulnerable’ places, allegedly the tropical, poor countries that would
need even more aid and intervention. I
consider this third group to be the political driver of the Kyoto process
and hence of major significance not in underpinning the whole affair, but
in making it acceptable to policy. It
gets least attention, however. It is essential for WG I’s functioning
and has helped to create the worst case scenarios of by providing the
emission scenarios, that is the societal future for the GCMs. These
scenarios are used by WG I to double the
CO2 content in the atmosphere, that is to
calculate future changes in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse
gases and aerosols at different dates in the future depending on energy
consumption and population growth, and
irrespective of what some experts, perhaps less wedded to
alternative energy and rapid economic growth, may think of the realism of these
scenarios. So
the model predictions we are to be scared or at least very worried about,
cannot be based on selected natural sciences only, that is a combination
of atmospheric chemistry and physics and observed increases in carbon
dioxide concentrations, but also on major socio-economic assumptions
provided by other experts groups working on ‘single issues’ and
tending to be deeply political if not visionary in the sense that they do
predict the future they want to shape. Here
is integration indeed, and integration that has developed most, I
understand, in the Netherlands.[9] Government,
business and NGOs dominate in this Group dedicated to mitigation as
solution: various ways of achieving emission reduction and emission
trading. Large parts of the
research efforts this group draws upon existed at national levels before
the problem of warming (rather than cooling)
was accepted on the political agenda of the EU. Most of the mitigation strategies
that are being advocated, with the exception of emission trading and the
CDM, are solutions to the 1970s oil crises, i.e. to high fossil fuel
prices: energy efficiency (not conservation),
nuclear power, renewables, higher energy taxes to reduce demand. The
mitigation solution involve many government and private sector
laboratories, officials responsible for subsidies and R&D developments, industries
that would benefit from green subsidies or tougher regulations. In whose
interest is all this activity: that of future generations? Perhaps, in the
meantime the costs would appear to fall to taxpayers who may not be
consulted though government officials would claim to represent than rather
than departmental interests. Internally,
the IPCC has perhaps functioned not serially
enough, and yet with
an excessive degree of dependence between different working groups. WGs II
and III tended to progress best on the basis of worst case scenarios from
WG I, even though the full range of hypotheses, or risks has not yet been
evaluated. WG III was committed to ‘decarbonisation’ from the start
and had an interest in high emission projections. This has biased research
by amplifying the likely dangers or doom scenarios so readily accepted by
all those groups that want to see rapid action by governments. Scares
being disseminated with reference to the IPCC help at the expense of
knowledge about the likely benefits of more carbon dioxide. In this way
the solutions advocated by the experts in WG III, and hence the
governments supporting these, were strengthened by IPCC pronouncements.
Let me conclude with giving you my three reasons why the IPCC may have
been a policy mistake, in spite of much scientific research done under its umbrella. A.
A. It was set up by few governments through intergovernmental bodies with suspect or at least complex motives. The interests that initiated it in
the late 1980s were: the meteorological offices
and Max Planck Gesellschaften of the North, WMO and UNEP. But behind these
stood and stands the ICSU and especially the IGBP – earth systems
research with vast data and instrumental needs, such as computing powers
and satellite data. Among the natural sciences there existed, in 1986 when
the price of fossil fuels collapsed, already a group that possessed a
global network of researchers keen to upgrade and test climate models and
better understand climatic variations. Obviously, without this energy
related political salience, relatively small research groups could not
have set up the IPCC. Indications of the potential seriousness of this
issue, or multiple opportunities, would be needed and were indeed provided
by IPCC efforts. B. The IPCC has been
dominated by a small number of leading natural scientists with very close
links to governments and strong personal beliefs, most from the UK and Sweden, with close links to the global research enterprise. None of the people to my knowledge
(Bolin, Houghton, Watson) have ever spoken
out in public against the exaggerations disseminated by politicians and
NGOs about the climate threat. Are they not good public servants before
they are scientists? They have brought funding to research that could
generate consensus among those selected or invited. Sound, that is policy relevant
science needs negotiations to reach consensus that allows policy to
progress. C. IPCC science and
social science remain exclusive within their own domains: that is ‘questioning’ natural and social sciences that do not
contribute to the basic research tool of the IPCC scientists -
mathematical computer models based on weather forecasting and hence
atmospheric physics and chemistry – tend to be excluded. The cost of
emission reductions and GNP impacts can be modelled globally by a few
economists; so they are welcome as ‘science’. Historians and political
analysts are less so. The interest of future generations are in, but not
of current ones. The models, in spite of growing sophistication, remain
primitive and should not be used for describing visions of the future (‘projections’) that politics can turn into
’predictions’ serving self-interested national policies presented as,
potentially at least, mandatory global policies that already justify huge
national investment and taxation programmes. Excluded are the solar
scientists, geologists and hydrologists/oceanographers and biologists who
all have something to say on climate and its changes. They are in general
suspicious of climate model findings and tend to disagree with the IPCC
that human activities are the most likely cause modifying the global
environment. And especially that global warming is a serious threat caused
primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, and what is most important here,
that we can do something to mitigate, combat or simply solve the problem,
rather than adapt to it gradually. Hence my SEVEN recommendations to change he nature of knowledge-based advice: in order of decreasing likelihood of their acceptability to governments.
Alternative? There is an alternative structure
for scientific advice at the international level. It has existed for many
years, much longer than the IPCC (since late 1970s)
without becoming politicised or
sending its ‘chairs’ to international negotiations. This is GESAMP :
JOINT GROUP OF EXPERTS ON THE SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF MARINE POLLUTION; an
advisory body consisting of specialised experts nominated by UN sponsoring
agencies (IMO, FAO, UNESCO/IOC, WMO, IAEA, UN and UNEP) to provide
scientific advice concerning the prevention, reduction and control of the
degradation of the marine environment to the Sponsoring Agencies, NOT
government engaged in highly political negotiations. GESAMP brings scientists together
in over 30 working groups of 10-20 people that do not have conflicting
allegiances or are charged, at home, with raising funds from those they
advise. It has published 71 reports so far. [11]
Should we have a JOINT GROUP OF EXPERTS ON THE SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF
CLIMATE? Research lobbies know their aims:
to get their research agendas funded and their strategy is to make these
agendas ‘relevant ‘ to society, which usually means the government of
the day; it means pleasing bureaucracies.[12] Other interests attracted
to ‘global warming’ opportunities included technology forcing, energy competition, transferring
investments to the South or making money from emission trading. They are
currently driving Kyoto forward irrespective of science. So many winners,
who are the losers? Should experts give advice on science when this
excludes the most important aspects of proposed policies based on
‘projections’, namely the ideologies that went into these projections
and the implications of the proposed
mitigation strategies? Perhaps
less ambition globally and more ambitions nationally will move the project
forward, and away from the Kyoto Protocol. Notes: 1. Reality may be less rosy. I have been told that the Administration has not yet put in any additional funding, and any funding that may come will not be there until the FY-2003 budget, so beginning October 1, 2002. The problem in the US has been that funding for about 8 years has been very close to level dollars in a field with greatly expanding issues arising for study. |
