Making Decisions in a Climate of Doubt

A billboard by the Heartland Institute outside of Chicago, May 2012.

What's going on with climate change? How are we doing?

As of this writing, the concentration of CO₂ (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, as recorded atop Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii, is a little over 394 ppm (parts per million) and rising at an accelerating rate.    Carbon dioxide, as we all should now know, is the primary greenhouse gas that is driving anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) global climate change.  The higher the concentration, the greater the change.

For some time, climate scientists have warned that atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ above 350 ppm would take the planet into a realm that is outside of historic human experience.  Indeed, "350" has become the mantra of a global grassroots movement seeking political and social solutions to this imminent threat.  Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ have exceeded 350 ppm since the late 1980s.  Given the current trajectory, some scientists and policy makers have proposed a new target.  In order to keep the change in global average temperature over the next century to less than 2 degrees Celsius (a small number with massive implications), we need to keep the concentration below 450 ppm.  At a recent open lecture at Northeastern University, Henry Jacoby, Professor of Applied Economics at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at MIT, warned, "We are about to blow through that level."  Massive change is going to happen.  He suggested, somewhat resignedly, that we will likely need to move the goal post back to something like 650 ppm - a concentration that projects a global average temperature rise somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 - 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.  This is a global temperature difference not seen since dinosaurs walked the earth.  No polar ice caps.  Sea levels from 30 to 120 meters higher than they are today.

There are lots of bright spots. Since about 2008, emissions of greenhouse gases from the wealthier, industrialized nations of the world have actually flattened, or even decreased.  This is good, although it appears to have had more to do with the economic recession and the rapid replacement of coal with suddenly cheaper natural gas (from fracking) than with with any deliberate effort.  Unfortunately, these decreases have been more than offset by rapid growth in emissions from industrializing nations, especially China and Brazil.

There is significant global action on climate change, but it is widely distributed or dispersed.  This action has been happening almost entirely at the local or regional level: by the European Union, by many states or provinces, by cities, and by a variety of non-governmental organizations, from businesses to non-profits.  Coordinated global action by the world's governments, however, is notably absent.  This absence of global leadership is striking.  The science around climate change has only improved.  The signals of rapid global change are not only clearer, but appear to be moving faster than even the worst case scenarios had predicted.  And for the last twenty years, it's been popularly assumed that a single, global treaty is the only viable way for the world to avert disruptive climate change. What happened to global leadership?  There is no simple answer to this question, but one issue that must be confronted is the role of the social and political movement against action on climate change.

The Kyoto Protocol was the first, and up to this point, last, serious international attempt at a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. The Kyoto Protocol was drafted in December 1997 by hundreds of delegates from around the world under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  It called for binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions, starting with the developed nations most responsible for the bulk of emissions to date.  At that time, the climate change policy debate was informed by more than three decades of accumulating scientific analysis from around the globe.  That's right, three decades.  Negotiations over this global treaty were intense and plagued by uncertainty, but advocates at the time had more than just decades of science on their side.  There was precedent for coordinated, global action on environmental threats.  Only a decade before, the U.S. led the charge on the Montreal Protocol.  This successful, global treaty banned the production of CFCs, a ubiquitous class of chemicals eating away at the ozone layer - a thin layer of gas in the atmosphere that protects life on Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. A variety of other international environmental efforts, from the control of transboundary air pollution to whaling, seemed to show that there could be coordinated, global action.

Proponents of the Kyoto Protocol argued that the science around climate change was well supported, the problem was urgent, action today would reduce the necessity of more costly and disruptive responses in the future, etc.  To a contemporary reader, what is probably most striking is how much these arguments haven't changed, and how they have only been reinforced by accumulating evidence and improved scientific understanding.  However, advocates of the Kyoto Protocol faced a new breed of political opposition.  New conservative organizations, many of which only emerged in the late 1980s, launched a well-funded and strategic campaign to cast doubt on scientific predictions about climate change and to thwart any policies aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions. In the early 1990s, these efforts were strengthened by a dramatic political shift in the U.S. that enabled conservative Republicans to take control of Congress, giving skeptical, conservative voices a powerful platform to amplify their message and to steer the U.S. away from making binding commitments. It was a critical moment in the incipient effort to tackle climate change, and we are still grappling with the implications of those decisions.

Today, it's hard to imagine a time when the issue of climate change wasn't polarized or partisan.  But there was a time, mostly before the late 1980s.  The political division over climate change that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s was profound, and it caught a lot of people off guard.  Some of the arguments against the Kyoto Protocol are still familiar and not particularly radical: concerns about impacts to the U.S. economy, concerns about imposing limits on the U.S. while allowing countries like China and India to continue unrestricted, concerns about the technical ability of the U.S. to even achieve the desired reductions.  There were, of course, more exotic arguments: the argument that more carbon dioxide will be good for plants and make the world greener, the argument that a warmer world will actually be more comfortable, etc.  But the most disruptive arguments have been the distortions and aspersions leveled at the science and scientists themselves.  Attacking the science seems to have sown confusion and left very little space for common ground.

During that last climate change lecture, Professor Jacoby asserted that the "Argument [against action on climate change] is not really about the science; it's about the role of government in your life."  Possibly.  It has often seemed that the debates have been at cross purposes; one side talking past the other.  For the scientifically-literate and the environmentally sensitive, the debate over whether to take action, or whether there even is a problem, has simply been baffling and frustrating.

It seems to me that the drama of climate change is not the increasingly dire message of impending catastrophe.  Rather, the drama is the political debate.  Climate change may be the biggest environmental threat ever faced by humanity, but it is the politics that poses the greatest challenge.

The story of the Kyoto Protocol is an excerpt from the chapter "Should the U.S. have signed the Kyoto Protocol?" in my book The Environment since 1945 (New York: Facts On File, 2012).