Over the last two decades there have been roughly a hundred or so published
greenhouse warming evaluations and assessments. Almost all have been prepared
by single governments or by nongovernmental organizations. Almost all have
carried the strong flavor of the perspectives and viewpoints of the entities
producing them. Almost all have been virtually ignored on the global scene,
apparently because those evaluations were perceived as not credible to
entities other than those who wrote them. It was clear that US-based evaluations,
including the most recent one (15),
were regarded with some mistrust by other countries.
In the ozone-depletion problem, there was a similar history. This pattern
was broken, however, with the first truly international ozone assessment
(16), sponsored by the World Meteorological
Organization. This effort was empowered by a large increase in participation
by the world ozone science community and, thus, in the authority of the
assessment. An encouraging result was a marked increase in the level of
attention and action by the world policy community. In contrast to the
current greenhouse warming situation, however, ozone depletion awareness
escalated rapidly thereafter, with the 1985 (17)
documentation of the Antarctic "ozone hole," a veritable smoking
gun that showed the actual problem to be much more severe than had previously
been predicted by the ozone science community.
The viability of the greenhouse warming assessment process was strongly
improved following the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) in 1988 and its report on Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific
Assessment in 1990 (14). The
IPCC process substantially changed the way the world policy-making and
decision-making communities deal with the greenhouse warming issue. The
internationalization of the process led to a common platform in which the
major contributors to this problem (essentially all human beings) can begin
to discuss ways to cope with its implications. In spite of the predictable
nit-picking (too aggressive, too timid, too political, insufficiently 101
political), IPCC has proved to be an enormous international success, at
least in my opinion.
The IPCC process and its assessment products were far from an instant success.
When the 1990 IPCC Report was released, it received a small mention in
a back page of the New York Times. Almost no other newspapers picked
up the story. In effect, it was a nonevent in the US media. Ironically,
the impending 1990 IPCC Report had been a very large event in the personal
lives of the reporters who were covering the high-amplitude stories that
were fueling the greenhouse warming controversy. The reporters had been
chasing some assertions that the IPCC report might reach some startling
new conclusions. Those of us being interviewed by reporters almost daily
before the release of the 1990 IPCC Report experienced a precipitous drop
in the frequency of interview requests after the release. My colleagues
and I inferred that the IPCC Report was apparently "too dull"
to receive major interest from the press. In effect, IPCC was saying what
climate scientists had been saying for some time: The greenhouse warming
problem is real; human-caused climate change could be substantial; the
climate models are credible; and the science has significant uncertainties
that must be recognized. I later asked some reporters about this and they
acknowledged that our inferences were correct. Without major changes in
the public perception of this problem, it was not seen by the reporters
as being very newsworthy. In effect, the controversy was much more interesting
"news" than the problem itself. The need of the media to find
intense and newsy stories had unfortunately overwhelmed whatever obligations
it may have had to inform its readers about the significance of the IPCC
conclusions.