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Home / Current / The origins of the IPCC:...


THE ORIGINS OF THE IPCC: HOW THE WORLD WOKE UP TO CLIMATE CHANGE

On the occasion of the IPCC’s 30th anniversary, we shine the light on the series
of pivotal events in 1980-85 that alerted scientists to the urgency of
addressing climate change, kicking politicians into action, and ultimately
leading to the birth of the world’s climate science assessment body.



This is the first part of a three-part blog series marking the 30th anniversary
of the IPCC.

> “All of a sudden we were seeing a problem that people had thought was going to
> be a hundred years away coming within the next generation.”

In 1985, Jill Jäger, an environmental scientist, attended a meeting in a small
town in the Austrian Alps. The meeting, chaired by a meteorologist named Bert
Bolin, was a small gathering of climate scientists intending to discuss the
results of one of the first international assessments of the potential for
human-induced climate change. Speaking to the BBC in 2014, Jäger remembers how
she left the event with a feeling that “something big is happening […] the big
adventure here was bringing all the pieces together and get this complete
picture and we can see that the changes are coming much faster.”

The 1985 Villach meeting was the culmination of a process in which three
international organizations – ICSU, UNEP and WMO – joined forces to bring an
issue onto the international policy agenda that to that day had been confined to
the pages of scientific journals and within the walls of conference rooms: the
threat of anthropogenic climate change. The meeting turned out to be the spark
that lit the fire that awakened the world’s governments, ultimately leading to
the creation of the IPCC in 1988.

This is the little-known story of scientists coming together to pool their
knowledge on an issue that most had been studying as a phenomenon within their
own discipline. When they did, they realized that what was on the horizon was so
big, it needed the urgent attention of policymakers – and a collaboration
between the policy and science communities that had never been attempted.


ORIGINS: DISCOVERING THE FIRST CLUES TO CLIMATE CHANGE

The first hints at the possible effects of man-made CO₂ emissions by scientists
– including that it could lead to a greenhouse effect – go back to the 19th
century. But it was only in the second half of the 20th century that the
scientific community really got interested. A key moment in building scientific
knowledge was the International Geophysical Year (IGY) organized by ICSU in
1957. The IGY was a landmark international effort to better understand the Earth
system – unprecedented in scope and international remit, with almost 70
countries participating. One of the scientists who received funding for their
projects as part of this year was a young American scientist, Charles D.
Keeling. He established the first permanent measurement of CO₂ levels in the
atmosphere from a research base on Mauna Loa, Hawaii. His measurements are being
continued to this day, and have become known as the Keeling curve – showing an
unrelenting increase in atmospheric CO₂ levels ever since.

In 1967, ICSU and WMO launched a global programme to better understand the
behaviour of the atmosphere and the physical basis of climate. The aim of the
Global Atmospheric Research Programme (GARP) was to improve the models used for
weather forecasting, but eventually it would be drawn into the climate issue. In
1967, a study had noted that a doubling of the CO₂ content of the atmosphere
would lead to an increase in global mean temperature of 2°C. In the next decade,
other researchers found that there had already been an increase of mean
temperature in the Northern hemisphere in the first decades of the twentieth
century. The open question at the time was whether this was a natural variation
or a human-induced change. This spurred interest in climate change in, for
example, the ecology and geology communities. In 1980, ICSU and WMO decided to
transform the GARP programme into an forum for international cooperation in
climate research. GARP became the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), still
making important contributions to modern climate science.

There was, however, still very little effort to synthesize available knowledge
about the climate change phenomenon. An initial assessment was prepared by the
US National Academy of Science in 1977, aimed at a scientific audience. In 1979,
WMO and UNEP organized a first Word Climate Conference. However, the conference
focused almost exclusively on the physical basis of climate change. It was
lacking in contributions from other disciplines and, apart from a call for more
resources for climate research, did not make any attempts to reach out of the
academic circles and create awareness of the issue.


VILLACH I: GATHERING THE PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

Shortly thereafter, however, ICSU, UNEP and WMO decided it was time for change.
They called for a different meeting. It was time for scientists to step outside
of the silos of their individual disciplines. It was time to bring the knowledge
gathered by national studies together. In October 1980, they called the elite of
global climate science to Villach to assemble the pieces of the puzzle. The
meeting was an intimate, international gathering of top-level scientists
studying climate change phenomena, bringing together physicists, chemists,
meteorologists, geographers, and other disciplines.

Peter Liss, a chemical oceanographer, attended the meeting. He remembers that
“Villach 1980 was a seminal meeting. This is when the scientists convinced
themselves that this was serious. The models were telling us that it was going
to happen.” He recalls that this was the first time that scientists from
different disciplines brought together the state of knowledge within their field
to paint a bigger picture. “People were working on a lot of different aspects at
the time, but this brought it all together showing that this was a big, global
problem,” he says. They worked out a statement that warned that “the probability
that these potentially serious impacts may be realized is sufficiently great” to
justify a concerted effort to improve the understanding of the changes underway
was needed and that “it is essential that the research proposed here be
undertaken as a matter of urgency.”

However, at the time, the outcomes of the meeting were not widely circulated. In
his semi-autobiographical account of the creation of the IPCC, Bert Bolin, who
chaired the meeting, describes how on the train ride home from that conference,
he and other participants discussed that something bigger was needed. Bolin says
he was of the clear view that “an analysis that was wider in scope, greater in
depth and more international was most desirable.”


VILLACH 1985: A CALL TO POLICY-MAKERS

That analysis was initiated by UNEP shortly after the conference. It became the
report “The assessment of the role of carbon dioxide and of other greenhouse
gases in climate variations and associated impacts”. In 1985, a second Villach
conference, again organized by ICSU, UNEP and WMO, met to discuss the results of
the study. It became clear that the combined effect of all greenhouse gases
could mean the equivalent of a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations might
be on the horizon before the middle of the 21st century. Climate change was
becoming a much more urgent issue than previously thought.

The scientists concluded that current convictions guiding investments and social
decisions that were based on the climate system remaining stable were “no longer
a good assumption,” because greenhouse gases were expected to cause a warming of
global temperatures “which is greater than any in man’s history.” For the first
time, they called for a collaboration between scientists and policymakers,
stating that the two groups “should begin active collaboration to explore the
effectiveness of alternative policies and adjustments.”

The 1985 Villach conference recommended that a task force should further study
the issue, and ICSU, WMO and UNEP formed the “Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases
(AGGG)”, with two members nominated by each organization. The group was more
aimed towards informing the leadership of the three organizations, rather than
engage with policy-makers. Its limitations were soon becoming obvious.


THE OZONE LAYER, DROUGHTS AND A MEDIA MOMENT

By then, however, political momentum had picked up. Possibly seeing an
opportunity following the process that led to the Montreal Protocol on
Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, UNEP Executive Director Mostafa Tolba
pushed for an international convention on climate change. In Toronto, the
“International Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global
Security” issued a stark warning: human impact on the planet was leading to a
multitude of environmental changes ranging from depletion of the ozone layer to
global warming and sea level rise, and was “likely to cause severe economic and
social dislocation.” An unusually hot summer in the USA led to worries about
food security, bringing the issue into public discussions. In part due to
support from parts of the influential U.S. administration, planning soon was
underway for an intergovernmental science-policy mechanism that was to create
regular assessments of the state of science on climate change, its impacts and
potential response strategies.

Both the political and the scientific community now agreed that action was
needed. All of a sudden, there was a perfect storm. The fact that there was an
increasing body of knowledge that needed to be assessed, that governments were
starting to see the need for such an assessment, and the convening efforts of
the WMO and UNEP. The scientists involved in the Villach meetings, on the other
hand, felt that, now that they had succeeded in bringing the issue to the
political agenda, it was appropriate to maintain the independence of research.
Scientific work should be performed independently of any government.

That is why ICSU at the time concentrated on rallying the scientific community
around the big research questions in climate change, global ecology and
biogeochemistry. It founded the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme
(IGBP) in 1986, which became a major supplier of knowledge to the IPCC
assessments. In 2014, the IGBP merged with two other ICSU-sponsored
environmental research programmes (the International Human Dimensions Programme
(IHDP) and DIVERSITAS), to form Future Earth, which is now working to supply the
scientific basis for a sustainable future. WCRP continues its contributions to
the analysis and prediction of climate change as part of Earth system change.

The intergovernmental nature of the new assessment body, on the other hand, made
it a natural fit within the remit of WMO and UNEP, both intergovernmental
organizations. They went on to form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) in 1988, whose anniversary we are celebrating this week. Happy
Birthday, IPCC!

Further Reading:

 * Agrawala, Shardul: Context and Early Origins of the Intergovernmental Panel
   on Climate Change. Climatic Change (1998) 39: 605.
   https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005315532386
 * Bolin, Bert: A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The
   Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University,
   Cambridge, 2007.

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Publishing date: March 10, 2018
Reading time: 11 minutes


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Disclaimer: The translations are automatically generated by Google Translate and
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