After 1988 (a first sketch, 1988-2001)

Most of the main essays have a section on events "After 1988." That was the year global warming became a major issue in public awareness. The number of articles in the popular press soared, and so did scientific publications on climate change. 1988 was also the year the key Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established. It serves as a good place to divide "historical" from "journalistic" writing.

The closer an account of events moves toward the present, the less it displays the special virtues we seek in a work of true history, the long-view perspectives and objective analysis. Writers and readers find it hard to pick out which recent developments will really matter in the long run. We also risk accepting as factual a report that conceals errors that will only later be revealed. Worse, opinions about present-day controversies infect views of the recent past with special virulence. Therefore be wary: these sections can be only preliminary sketches.

The cutoff date for these sections is May 1, 2001. (Where later work cast light on puzzles, I have added scientific references in the notes, and in some cases have added text in [brackets].) This is roughly the point when the draft third report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change appeared, establishing a consensus that serious warming was likely but not certain. (1*) Inevitably for such a complex issue, some scientists argued that the consensus was in error. The reservations could be expected to linger for decades, until global temperatures actually did soar (or did not). Since the 1980s, scientists had not been able to narrow the range of uncertainty they announced for their estimates of future temperatures, although they had grown more confident that the estimates were soundly based. They also admitted that they could not guarantee there would be no "surprises" outside the announced range of uncertainty, for better or worse. Moreover, skeptics continued to come up with arguments and evidence suggesting there was no need to worry about climate change; no sooner was one argument proved invalid than they came up with another. In short, policy-makers had gotten the best answer they were likely to hear. Meanwhile the new administration in the United States repudiated the international negotiations concluded so far, starting a new phase in the world's attempts to confront the issue. Now the largest source of uncertainty about the future climate was no longer in climate science, but in human social and economic choices—how much greenhouse gases would we emit?

For basic information and current developments see the links page.

LINKS to the "After 1988" sections:

20th century temperatures
Aerosols
Biosphere
Carbon dioxide greenhouse effect
Climate cycles
Sea flooding
General Circulation Models
Government

1. The panel’s final report, IPCC (2001), gives a good summary of the state of research at this point, including ten times more references than I have given to publications of the 1990s. There was also a scientific milestone in spring 2001: a convincing match between computer models and an observed rise of the oceans' heat content (more significant than atmospheric heat), helping to nail down the panel’s conclusion: Levitus, Antonov et al. (2001); Barnett, Pierce et al. (2001). BACK

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