Abstract
In An Inconvenient Truth, an award-winning documentary film, Al Gore used startling graphs and dramatic photos to summarize the scientific consensus on global warming and its past and projected impacts on planet Earth and its inhabitants. Along with human population growth and more powerful technologies, he cited “our way of thinking” as a third major factor that has transformed humanity’s relationship to the earth. Supporting our way of thinking are certain misconceptions the former vice president of the United States attributed to special interests. For example, he reported a leaked internal memo that advised lobbyists and public relations specialists for a group of companies including ExxonMobil to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.” And they succeeded to the extent that 53% of the 623 news stories in a random sample from influential newspapers did raise doubts about global warming. But in the end, Gore’s message about meeting this planetary emergency, as he called it, was upbeat in view of the array of technologies available to curb global warming and its impacts: “We already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem. We’ve got to do a lot of things, not just one.” But he concluded with an important qualification: “We have everything we need, save perhaps political will.”1
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Notes
Emphasis added, quoted from An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning, directed by David Guggenheim and released by Paramount Classics in 2006. This film was an official selection of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival, and won the Academy Award in 2007 for Best Documentary. The printed companion is Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (New York: Rodale, 2006). Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for his leadership on global warming.
Bjorn Lomborg, e.g., emphasized the differences between Gore and the IPCC in “Ignore Gore—But Not His Nobel Friends,” The Sunday Telegraph (London) (11 November 2007), 24. On the scientific consensus in the United States, see Jane A. Leggett, Climate Change: Science and Policy Implications, CRS Report for Congress RL33849 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Updated 2 May 2007). On the scientific consensus in the international community, see the widely publicized assessments of the IPCC that are introduced below and summarized in later chapters.
See the UNFCCC’s background information on the Kyoto Protocol, accessed 5 September 2007, at http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/background/items/3145.php. See also Susan R. Fletcher and Larry Parker, Climate Change: The Kyoto Protocol and International Actions, CRS Report for Congress RL 33836 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Updated 8 June 2007).
David A. King, “Climate Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate, or Ignore?” Science 303 (9 January 2004), 176–177. At the time King was science advisor to her Majesty’s government in the United Kingdom. For details on the Kyoto Protocol, see http:// unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/background.php.
However, some data are starting to be analyzed. Michael R. Raupach, Gregg Marland, Philippe Ciais, Corinne Le Quéré, Josep G. Canadell, Gernot Klepper, and Christopher B. Field, “Global and Regional Drivers of Accelerating CO2 Emissions,” Proc. National Academy of Sciences 104(24) (12 June 2007), 10,288–10,293 (DOI 10.1073/pnas.0700609104), “Together, the developing and least-developed economies (forming 80% of the world’s population) accounted for 73% of global emissions growth in 2004 but only 41% of global emissions and only 23% of global cumulative emissions since the mid-18th century.”
Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes,” New York Times (26 August 2007), 1.
However, CO2 emissions per person were 19.4 tons in America and only 5.1 tons in China. Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Booming China Leads the World in Emissions of Carbon Dioxide, a Study Finds,” New York Times (14 June 2008), A5.
Recent analyses suggest that the peak and decline should happen earlier and at much lower concentrations than those estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Fourth Assessment Report (2007). See the work by Malte Meinhausen and colleagues from Nature 458 (30 April 2009), 1158–1162, and Global Environmental Change 17 (May 2007), 260–280, the basis for the stabilization level presented here. Some researchers suggest that there is no level above current levels that can guarantee temperature increases of 2°C or less in this century. For example, Andrew Weaver and colleagues find that a 90% global emissions reductions, com bined with direct capture of already emitted greenhouse gases in the air, is required to meet this criterion. See Geophys. Res. Lett. 34 (October 2007), L19703.
IPCC, Working Group III, Summary for Policymakers in Climate Change 2007: Mitigation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 3: “Between 1970 and 2004, global emissions of CO2, CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs and SF6, weighted by their global warming potential, have increased by 70% (24% between 1990 and 2004), from 28.7 to 49 Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents. The emissions of these gases have increased at different rates. CO2 emissions have grown between 1970 and 2004 by about 80% (28% between 1990 and 2004) and represented 77% of total anthropogenic GHG emissions in 2004.”
Stefan Rahmstorf, Anny Cazenave, John A. Church, James E. Hansen, Ralph F. Keeling, David E. Parker, and Richard C. J. Somerville, “Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections,” Science 316 (May 2007), 709, DOI: 10.1126/ science.1136843.
Martin Parry, Nigel Arnell, Mike Hulme, Robert Nicholls, and Matthew Livermore, “Commentary: Adapting to the Inevitable,” Nature 393 (22 October 1998), 741; and Roger A. Pielke, Jr., “Rethinking the Role of Adaptation in Climate Policy,” Global Environmental Change 8 (1998), 159–170.
Munich Re Group, Topics 2000: Natural Catastrophes—the Current Position (Special Millenium Issue), 43. The category “great natural catastrophes” includes floods, windstorms, and earthquakes. See also Association of British Insurers, Financial Risks of Climate Change: Summary Report (June 2005), available at http:// www.abi.org.uk/climatechange.
Earth Policy Institute, Hurricane Damages Soar to New Levels (Update 58, 2006), accessed at www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update58.
IPCC, Working Group I, Summary for Policymakers, in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), notes in Table SPM.2, 8, that increases in heavy precipitation events and tropical cyclone intensity are “likely” to have been observed and “more likely than not” to be attributable to human activities in whole or part. But both the observations and the linkages to human activities remain an area of active investigation and debate. See, e.g., Judith A. Curry, Peter J. Webster, and Greg J. Holland, “Mixing Politics and Science in Testing the Hypothesis that Greenhouse Warming Is Causing a Global Increase in Hurricane Intensity,” Bull.Amer. Meteor. Soc. 87(8) (2006), 1025; Peter J. Webster, Greg J. Holland, Judith A. Curry, and Hai-Ru Chang, “Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment,” Science 309 (2005), 1844–1846; Kerry Emmanuel, “Increasing Destructiveness of Tropical Cyclones Over the Past 30 Years,” Nature 436 (2005), 686–699; and James B. Elsner, James P. Kossin, and Thomas H. Jagger, “The Increasing Intensity of the Strongest Hurricanes,” Nature 455 (4 September 2008), 92–95. Scientists engaged in active debate on this topic signed a statement on the U.S. Hurricane Problem (25 July 2006), urging that the debate “should in no event detract from the main hurricane problem facing the United States: the ever-growing concentration of population and wealth in vulnerable coastal areas. These demographic trends are setting us up for rapidly increasing human and economic losses from hurricane disasters, especially in this era of heightened activity.” The statement is posted at http://wind.mit.edu/~emanuel/ Hurricane_threat.htm.
Judith A. Merkle, “Scientific Management,” in Jay M. Shafritz, Ed., International Encyclopedia of Public Policy and Administration (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 2036–2040 at 2040. Of course the term “scientific management” is subject to various interpretations as it continues to evolve. See also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); and John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New York, NY: Vintage, 1993).
Ronald D. Brunner, Toddi A. Steelman, Lindy Coe-Juell, Christina M. Cromley, Christine M. Edwards, and Donna W. Tucker, Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision Making (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 2. For more on scientific management, see also Ronald D. Brunner, Christine H. Colburn, Christina M. Cromley, Roberta A. Klein, and Elizabeth A. Olson, Finding Common Ground: Governance and Natural Resources in the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
See Brunner et al., Adaptive Governance, and the sources cited therein on natural resource policy. Variants of adaptive governance elsewhere in the American context can be found in Hedrick Smith, Rethinking America: A New Game Plan from the American Innovators: Schools, Business, People, and Work (New York, NY: Random House: 1995); Lisbeth B. Schorr, Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1997); and Notes to Pages 6–7 321 Thomas Petzinger, Jr., The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Tranforming the Workplace and the Marketplace (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1999). George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy,” The New Yorker (18 December 2006), 60–69, emphasizes disaggregating (or factoring) security problems. The term “adaptive governance” is not used in these variants of the basic concept as we understand it. Conversely, the term is used for overlapping concepts in the following: Thomas Dietz, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul Stern, “The Struggle to Govern the Commons,” Science 302 (12 December 2003), 1907–1912, which has a section titled “Adaptive Governance”; Carl Folke, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg, “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems,” Annu. Rev. Environ. Res. 30 (2005), 441–473; Lance Gunderson and Stephen S. Light, “Adaptive Management and Adaptive Governance in the Everglades Ecosystem,” Policy Sciences 39 (2006), 323–334; and Rohan Nelson, Mark Howden, and Mark Stafford Smith, “Using Adaptive Governance to Rethink the Way Science Supports Australian Drought Policy,” Environ. Science & Policy 11 (2008), 588–601. In short, a grounded interpretation of the term “adaptive governance” depends on the particular context in which it is used.
Several frames at a smaller scale, and more specialized to climate change politics in the United States, are surveyed by Matthew C. Nisbet and Chris Mooney, “Framing Science,” Science 316 (6 April 2007), 56, in an effort to improve the communication of science. The frames are “scientific uncertainty” and “unfair economic burden” on the one hand, and on the other, a “Pandora’s box” of catastrophes and “public accountability” from official censoring of climate science.
Julia Uppenbrink, “Arrhenius and Global Warming,” Science 272 (24 May 1996), 1122. For more on the history of such predictions, see the letter by Neville Nicholls, “Climate: Sawyer Predicted Rate of Warming in 1972,” Nature 448 (30 August 2007), 992.
Quoted by John Firor in The Changing Atmosphere: A Global Challenge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 48. Note that the statement did not warn of the peril of the experiment; instead, it highlighted an opportunity for science, one acted upon during the International Geophysical Year from July 1957 to December 1958. A young geochemist, Charles David Keeling, began to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in order to understand how carbon dioxide was exchanged between atmosphere and ocean. See our Fig. 1.1.
Bert Bolin and Erik Eriksson, “Changes in the Carbon Dioxide Content of the Atmosphere and Sea Due to Fossil Fuel Combustion,” in Bert Bolin, Ed., The Atmosphere and the Sea in Motion (New York, NY: Rockefeller Institute Press, 1959), 130–142; and Bert Bolin, “Atmospheric Chemistry and Broad Geophysical Relationships,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 45 (1959), 1663–1672. In the latter article, Bolin suggested that the first noticeable increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was reported by G. S. Callendar in 1938 in the Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc. in an article titled “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature.” But in fact Irish physicist and contemporary of Charles Darwin, John Tyndall, was the first to discover the so-called “greenhouse” effect. In the mid-19th century Tyndall showed in the laboratory that gases such as water vapor and carbon dioxide are transparent to light energy but absorb heat energy. More importantly, he realized that this property explained the average temperature at the surface of the earth, which is warmer than expected given the energy input from the sun, and that increases in these gases in the atmosphere would cause an increase in temperature.
The following sketch of the establishment of the climate change regime is adapted from Ronald D. Brunner, “Science and the Climate Change Regime,” Policy Sciences 34 (2001), 1–33, and based on a variety of sources primarily including: Daniel Bodansky, “Prologue to the Climate Change Convention,” in I. M. Mintzer and J. A. Leonard, Eds., Negotiating Climate Change: the Inside Story of the Rio Convention (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45–74; Daniel Bodansky, “The Emerging Climate Change Regime,” Annu. Rev. Energy Environ. 20 (1995), 425–461; Sonja A. Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy: The Limits of Scientific Advice,” Global Environ. Change 4 (1994), Part I (June), 140–159, and Part II (September), 185–200; Sonja A. Boehmer-Christiansen, “A Scientific Agenda for Climate Policy?” Nature 368 (10 March 1994), 400–402; Alan D. Hecht and Dennis Tirpak, “Framework Agreement on Climate Change: A Scientific and Political History,” Climatic Change 29 (1995), 371–402; Sheldon Ungar, “Social Scares and Global Warming: Beyond the Rio Convention,” Soc. Nat. Res. 8 (1995), 443–456; Jill Jäger and Tim O’Riordan, “The History of Climate Change Science and Politics,” in Tim O’Riordan and Jill Jäger, Eds., The Politics of Climate Change: A European Perspective (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 1–31; and Shardul Agrawala, “Early Science-Policy Interactions in Climate Change: Lessons from the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gasses,” Global Environ. Change 9 (1999), 157–169.
Bodansky, “Prologue to the Climate Change Convention,” 48.
Quoted in Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy,” Part I, 157. It was officially called the International Conference on the Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts.
Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy,” Part I, 157. Compare Agrawala, “Early Science-Policy Interactions in Climate Change,” 168, on the significance of the AGGG: “It was the establishment of a standing advisory panel, the AGGG, and the group of experts that coalesced under its auspices that ‘kept the climate flame alive’ and eventually jogged the policy community into action.”
Boehmer-Christiansen, “A Scientific Agenda for Climate Policy?” 401. The ICSU later changed its name to the International Council for Science but kept the acronym. For an overview of scientific organizations involved in the World Climate Research Program and their links to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, see Our Changing Planet: The FY 1990 Research Plan: The U.S. Global Change Research Program, A Report by the Committee on Earth Sciences (July 1989), pp. 24–25. These organizational charts do not show the overlapping memberships of leading scientists such as Bert Bolin of Sweden.
Bodansky, “Prologue to the Climate Change Convention,” 50.
Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy,” Part I, 157.
“The Greenhouse Effect: Impact on Current Global Temperature and Regional Heat Wave,” Statement of James E. Hansen, Hearings before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, 100th Congress, 1st Session, on The Greenhouse Effect and Global Climate Change (23 June 1998), Part 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office).
On the lack of political will, compare Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economic Science, in “A New Agenda for Global Warming,” Economists’ Voice (July 2006), 1–4, at 4: “The well-being of our entire planet is at stake. We know what needs to be done. We have the tools at hand. We only need the political resolve.” Compare also Jared Diamond, “What’s Your Consumption Factor?” New York Times (2 January 2008), A10, on necessary and desirable trends in per capita consumption rates that have a bearing on climate change: “[W]e already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.”
Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy,” Part II, 187.
Ibid., 189. On the selection of the chair for the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report and perhaps a veto, see the letter by Bert Bolin, “Politics and the IPCC,” Science 296 (17 May 2002), 1235. See also the memorandum “Regarding: Bush Team for IPCC Negotiations” (6 February 2001), from Randy Randol, senior environment advisor at ExxonMobil, to the White House CEQ. It asked, “Can [IPCC Chair Robert] Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?” The memo was released by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act. See http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/020419a.asp.
Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy,” Part II, 189. Compare Agrawala, “Early Science-Policy Interactions in Climate Change,” 166: “By late 1990, experts working nominally under the AGGG had lost, to the IPCC, a Darwinian selection struggle imposed by the climate science and policy environment.”
Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy,” Part II, 188.
From the Preface to the IPCC, Second Assessment Synthesis of Scientific-Technical Information Relevant to Interpreting Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1995). Working groups on “[i]mpacts and responses were combined in 1993, while a new group was set up to look at ‘cross-cutting’ aspects, with contributions from a wider range of social sciences” according to Boehmer-Christiansen, “A Scientific Agenda for Climate Policy?” 402. For a defense of the IPCC, see Richard H. Moss, “The IPCC: Policy Relevant (Not Driven) Scientific Assessment,” Global Environ. Change 5 (1995), 171–174, in the form of a comment on Boehmer-Christiansen’s two-part article in the same journal, vol. 4 (1994).
Bodansky, “Prologue to the Climate Change Convention,” 51.
We are grateful to Dr. Elbert W. (Joe) Friday, a participant in the events described here, for corroborating the history in the first three paragraphs of this section: “That is very much as I remember it” (personal communication, 20 September 2008). Friday went on to explain that he and his scientific colleagues sought to create a larger and more effective AGGG within the IPCC. In our assessment of the record, the IPCC turned out to be larger but less effective in policy arenas. Friday served in the U.S. government as assistant administrator for Weather Services and director of the National Weather Service from 1988 to 1997.
Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy,” Part II, 190.
The budget of USGCRP increased from $134 million in FY 1989 to $659 million in FY 1990 and exceeded $1 billion for the first time in FY 1992. Jane A. Leggett, Climate Change: Federal Expenditures, CRS Report for Congress RL33817 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 22 January 2007), 8.
See Agrawala, “Early Science-Policy Interactions in Climate Change,” 160, on overlapping affiliations of several major figures in the AGGG, and the short biography of Richard Moss published in Moss, “The IPCC: Policy Relevant (Not Driven) Scientific Assessment,” 171.
Paul N. Edwards, “Global Comprehensive Models in Politics and Policymaking: Editorial Essay,” Climatic Change 32 (1996), 149–161, at 152.
Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy,” Part II, 195. Agrawala, “Early Science-Policy Interactions in Climate Change,” 167, recognizes “the delicate trade-off between the need for continuity and instincts for self-preservation” as the most important lesson to be drawn from the experience of AGGG and the early IPCC.
Compare Al Gore, in a discussion of An Inconvenient Truth as quoted by David Neff in “Al Gore: Preacher Man,” ChristianityToday.com (31 May 2006): “Science thrives on uncertainty; politics is paralyzed by uncertainty.” Accessed at http:// www.christianitytoday.com/movies/commentaries/algore.html.
Consider Bert Bolin, chair of the IPCC at the time, in “Next Step for Climate-Change Analysis,” Nature 368 (10 March 1994), 94: “Just what is meant by the word ‘dangerous’ needs to be sorted out. IPCC will bring together basic knowledge of relevance in this context, but reaching agreement is a political issue and must therefore be achieved through intergovernmental negotiations within the framework of the convention.” Consider also Syukuro Manabe, a pioneering climate modeler: “Once I start promoting my political views, my credibility as a scientist is compromised. I would rather not take a position—I may have one—but I don’t want to take it publicly.” Quoted in Agrawala, “Early Science-Policy Interactions in Climate Change,” 164.
IPPC, Second Assessment Synthesis of Scientific-Technical Information Relevant to Interpreting Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1995), sec. 1.9. For a more recent example of the global framing, see Thomas R. Karl and Kevin E. Trenberth, “Modern Global Climate Change,” Science 302 (5 December 2003, 1719–1723, at 1722: “Climate change is truly a global issue, one that may prove to be humanity’s greatest challenge. It is very unlikely to be addressed without greatly improved international cooperation and action.” See also King, “Climate Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate, or Ignore?” 177: “But any alternative would need to accept that immediate action is required and would need to involve all countries in tackling what is truly a global problem.”
Compare Boehmer-Christiansen, “A Scientific Agenda for Climate Policy?” 402: “Global policy on global warming [in 1994] is emerging from untidy political processes—not through technocratic design.” She adds that “political battles over the knowledge base have also grown.”
Quoted in David Malakoff, “Thirty Kyotos Needed to Control Warming,” Science 278 (19 December 1997), 2048.
Compare the assessments in Boehmer-Christiansen, “Global Climate Protection Policy,” Part II, 192; Bodansky, “The Emerging Climate Change Regime,” 438; and Ungar “Social Scares and Global Warming,” 448. These are summarized in Chapter 2.
See Andrew C. Revkin, “Years Later, Climatologist Renews His Call For Action,” New York Times (23 June 2008); and Dana Milbrook, “Burned Up about the Other Fossil Fuel,” Washington Post (24 June 2008), A3.
William C. Clark, “Managing Planet Earth,” Scientific American 261 (September 1989), 47–54, at 47. On the history of the global faming, see Dimitris Stevis, “The Globalizations of the Environment,” Globalizations 2 (December 2005), 323–333.
Hendrik Tennekes, “A Sideways Look at Climate Research,” Weather 45 (1990), 67–68, at 68. The explanation of technocratic totalitarianism came in a letter from Hendrik Tennekes (21 July 1997) in response to a query from the first author.
All quotations in this paragraph are from Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, “Commentary: Zen and the Art of Climate Maintenance,” Nature 390 (27 November 1997), 332–334, at 332, 333. Their conclusion is “Ten Suggestions for Policymakers,” in Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone, Eds., Human Choice & Climate Change, Volume 4: What Have We Learned? (Columbus, OH: Battelle Press, 1998), 109–138.
David W. Cash, “Viewpoint: Distributed Assessment Systems: An Emerging Paradigm of Research, Assessment and Decision-Making for Environmental Change,” Global Environ. Change 10 (2000), 241–244, at 241, 242. A major source for Cash was Thomas J. Wilbanks and Robert W. Kates, “Global Change in Local Places: How Scale Matters,” Climatic Change 43 (1999), 601–628. Cash cites as another example of a distributed information-decision support system the U.S. Cooperative State Research Education and Extension Service. We consider this Progressive Era innovation to be more like a centralized system in the tradition of scientific management. This follows Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 4th ed. (New York, NY: Free Press, 1995), 364–369, which distinguishes centralized and decentralized models of diffusion.
See the Preface for more on the history of the project and this book. Amanda Lynch, project principal investigator and atmospheric scientist, had developed regional climate models for the Arctic and conducted research in Barrow as a member of the faculty at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and later the University of Colorado at Boulder. She and others in her group recruited as another coprincipal investigator Ron Brunner, a policy scientist at the University of Colorado with prior interests in decentralized energy, natural resources, and climate change policies. For early research relevant to this project, see, e.g., Amanda H. Lynch, W. L. Chapman, John E. Walsh, and Gunter Weller, “Development of a Regional Climate Model of the Western Arctic,” J. Climate 8 (1995), 1555–1570; and Ronald D. Brunner, “Decentralized Energy Policies,” Public Policy 28 (Winter 1980), 71–91.
For a summary of project research, see Amanda H. Lynch and Ronald D. Brunner, “Context and Climate Change: An Integrated Assessment for Barrow, Alaska,” Climatic Change 82 (2007), 93–111. The most extensive summary is Amanda Lynch and Ronald Brunner et al., Barrow Climatic and Environmental Conditions and Variations—A Technical Compendium (Boulder, CO: Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, 2004), 132 pages. This was circulated for corrections and comments in Barrow in the fall of 2004. It includes the chapter “Policy Responses,” 67–132. On policy, see also Ronald D. Brunner and Amanda H. Lynch et al., “An Arctic Disaster and Its Policy Implications,” Arctic 57 (December 2004), 336–346. For further information on the project, see http://nome.colorado.edu/HARC/index. html. We based the integrative and policy aspects of this research on the policy sciences; see Harold D. Lasswell, A Pre-View of Policy Sciences (New York, NY: Elsevier, 1971). There was no need to create yet another conceptual framework.
From the Preface to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, Impacts of a Warming Arctic (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), which continues with specifics: The Arctic Council “is comprised of eight arctic nations (Canada, Denmark/Greenland/Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States of America), six Indigenous Peoples Organizations (Permanent Participants: Aleut International Association, Arctic Athabaskan Council, Gwich’in Council International, Inuit Circumpolar Conference, Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, and Saami Council), and official observers (including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, non-governmental organizations, and scientific and other international bodies).” As noted in Chapter 3, the Iñupiat in Barrow took the lead in establishing the Inuit Circumpolar Conference.
Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), xxii–xxiii. Emphasis in original. For the authors at least, these ideal types are not ends in themselves. They are means of advancing the common interest as clarified near the end of this chapter.
IPCC, Second Assessment Synthesis, secs. 5.2 and 5.3.
Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” 126.
William D. Ruckelshaus, “Toward a Sustainable World,” Scientific American 261 (September 1989), 166–174, at 166. Ruckelshaus was then a former administrator of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency and member of the World Commission on Environment and Development.
IPCC, Second Assessment Synthesis of Scientific-Technical Information relevant to interpreting Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1995), sec. 1.9. More recently King, “Climate Change Science: Adapt, Mitigate, or Ignore?” 177, affirmed that “issues of justice and equity lie at the heart of the climate change problem.”
This total is in constant 2007 dollars beginning with FY 1989, and includes the estimate for FY 2008 and the request for FY 2009. It is calculated from annual data in Our Changing Planet: The U. S. Climate Science Program for FY 2009, 4, accessible at http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/ocp2009/.
This closely paraphrases the definition in the policy sciences and policyoriented jurisprudence. On the former, see Lasswell and Kaplan, Power and Society, 23. Emphasis in original: “An interest is a pattern of demands and its supporting expectations… The point that the definition aims to bring out is simply that an interest is neither a blind desire nor a knowing untinged by valuation. In every interest analysis discloses competent demands and expectations both.” In policy-oriented jurisprudence, see Myres S. McDougal, Harold D. Lasswell, and W. Michael Reisman, International Law Essays (Mineola, NY: Foundation Press, 1981), 205: “By an interest, we refer to a value demand formulated in the name of an identity and supported by expectations that the demand is advantageous.”
The Universal Declaration was adopted by General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III) in December 1948. It may be accessed at http://www.un.org/Overview/rights. html. The declaration denies exclusive rights claimed by the select few. “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” (Article 2). Moreover, “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives” and “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government” (Article 21). Near its 60th anniversary, the declaration was invoked by Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and former UN High Commission for Human Rights, in connection with the Poznan meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC. See her comment, “Climate Change Is an Issue of Human Rights,” The Independent (London) (10 December 2008). It was republished at about the same time in The Australian, The Irish Times, and The Belfast Telegraph. See also International Council on Human Rights Policy, Climate Change and Human Rights: A Rough Guide (Geneva: 2008), accessed at http://www. ichrp.org/files/reports/36/136_report.pdf.
Brunner et al., Finding Common Ground, 8. Emphasis added. For fuller development of the concept and applications, see pp. 8–18 and the literature cited therein. Compare McDougal, Lasswell, and Reisman, International Law Essays, 205: “In the most fundamental sense, international law is a process by which the peoples of the world clarify and implement their common interests in the shaping and sharing of values.” Values are preferred outcomes.
Brunner et al., Finding Common Ground, 8.
For an example of goal displacement and substitution, see Edwards, “Global Comprehensive Models in Politics and Policymaking,” 150, which argues that “the emergence of [an ‘epistemic community’] is one major reason why global change has reached the political agenda of governments, and thus that comprehensive model building serves an all-important political purpose even if it does not and perhaps cannot serve the immediate needs of policy makers.” For a reply, see Radford Byerly, Jr., “Editorial Comment,” Climatic Change 32 (1996), 163–164, at 163: “For costs of more than a billion dollars a year … more than an ‘epistemic community’ is rightly expected from the USGCRP.”
For guidance on the responsibilities of scientists in public policy, we recommend Harold D. Lasswell, “The Political Science of Science: An Inquiry into the Possible Reconciliation of Mastery with Freedom,” Amer. Political Sci. Rev. 50 (December 1956), 961–979; and Harold D. Lasswell, “Must Science Serve Political Power?” Amer. Psychol. 25 (1970), 117–123. More generally, for guidance on answering the question, “What ought I to prefer,” we recommend Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal, Jurisprudence for a Free Society: Studies in Law, Science and Policy (New Haven, CT, and Dordrecht, Netherlands: New Haven Press and Martinus Nijhoff), 725–758.
Compare Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 9: “We need to remind ourselves that our ultimate goal is not to reduce greenhouse gases or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and environment.” Compare also Robinson, “Climate Change Is an Issue of Human Rights”: “Urgently cutting emissions must be done in order to respect and protect human rights from being violated by the future impacts of climate change, while supporting the poorest communities to adapt to already occurring climate impacts is the only remedy for those whose human rights have already been violated.”
See Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World (2004), which characterized environmentalism as a special interest and proposed opening global warming politics in the United States to enlist the support of nonenvironmental interest groups on whom progress depends. Their paper was accessed at http://www.thebreakthrough. org/ images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf. See also Thomas L. Friedman, “The Power of Green,” New York Times Magazine (15 April 2007), 40.
See Ehsan Masood, “Temperature Rises in Dispute Over Costing Climate Change,” Nature 378 (30 November 1995), 429. See also M. Granger Morgan, Milind Kandlikar, James Risbey, and Hadi Dowlatabadi, “Why Conventional Tools for Policy Analysis Are Often Inadequate for Problems of Global Change: An Editorial Essay,” Climatic Change 41 (1999), 271–281, at 271, 273.
This paraphrases Stanford economist Paul Romer, who is quoted in Thomas L. Friedman, “It’s a Flat World After All,” New York Times Magazine (3 April 2005). Compare Rahm Emanuel—“you don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste”—as quoted in Paul Krugman, “Franklin Delano Obama,” New York Times (10 November 2008), A25.
Stevis, “The Globalization of the Environment,” notes that the image “Spaceship Earth” appeared as early as the mid-1960s. The image is current in Peter A. Corning, “From My Perspective: Why We Need a Strategic Plan for’ spaceship Earth,’” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 72 (2005), 749–752, which attributes it to the economist Kenneth Boulding.
From “Think Conservation Before Water Supplies Kick the Bucket,” an editorial in the Sunday Age (28 January 2007), 16.
Rayner and Malone, “Ten Suggestions,” 113.
On the significance of details in the historical sciences, including policy sciences, see Chapter 4. On uncertainty absorption, see James G. March, Herbert A. Simon, and Harold Guetzkow, Organizations (New York, NY: John Wiley, 1958), 164–165: “Uncertainty absorption takes place when inferences are drawn from a body of evidence and the inferences, instead of the evidence itself, are then communicated. … Through the process of uncertainty absorption, the recipient of a communication is severely limited in his ability to judge its correctnes…. To the extent that he can interpret it, his interpretation must be based primarily on his confidence in the source and his knowledge of the biases to which the source is subject, rather than on a direct examination of the evidence.”
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Brunner, R.D., Lynch, A.H. (2010). Clarifying the Problem. In: Adaptive Governance and Climate Change. American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-935704-01-0_1
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