Global Climate Change; It’s Getting Hot in Here An Oral History of the IPCC’s work to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
Interviewer --- Claire Gregory
Interviewee --- James Edmonds
Instructor --- Mr. Haight
Date of Submission --- February 11th, 2014
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Table of contents
Interviewee Release Form ……………….………………………………………………. 2
Interviewer Release Form ………………………………….……………………………. 3
Statement of Purpose ………………….………………………………………………… 4
Biography ………………………………………………………………………...……… 5
Historical Contextualization: The Development of Climate Change on the Global Scale 6
Interview Transcription ……………………………………………………...…………. 18
Audio Time Indexing Log ……………………………………………...……………… 34
Interview Analysis ………………………………...…………………………………… 35
Works Consulted …………………………………………………………...…………... 40
Appendix …………………………………………………………...…………………... 42
Statement of purpose
The purpose of this project is to gain a historical understanding of the IPCC’s involvement in the work that went towards winning the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Interviewing Mr. James (Jae) Edmonds provides a firsthand account of the processes used by the IPCC from the perspective of a lead author. This interview will allow historians to compare and contrast evidence provided by history texts with that of someone who lived through the experience itself. This will let historians to gain a well- rounded understanding of the IPCC’s contributions to the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
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Biography
James (Jae) Edmonds was born in 1948. He was born in Chicago, Illinois. Mr.
Edmonds spent most of his life in the suburbs of Chicago, namely in a small town called
Barrington. He lived near a railroad line, which was used like the metro for daily commutes between Barrington and Chicago. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from Duke
University in 1975. Mr. Edmonds is a Chief Scientist and Battelle Laboratory Fellow at the PNNL’s (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) Joint Global Change Research
Institute. He is also the Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at University of Maryland.
Mr. Edmonds is also the principal investigator for the Global Energy Technology
Strategy Program to Address Climate Change. He has written many books, including his most recent one Global Energy Technology Strategy, Addressing Climate Change. Mr.
Edmonds has served as a Lead Author for every major IPCC assessment to date. At the moment he is serving on the IPCC Steering Committee on “New Integrated Scenarios”.
The development of Climate Change on the Global Scale
For generations people looked the other way as the globe heated up, to points that should have been alarming, but were ignored. Climate change has been around for centuries, but never officially named as an issue. Humans generally assumed that the climate changed randomly, and that they couldn’t possibly have any effect on it. People did not dwell on the weather too much until they started noticing the gradual changes, specifically the warming of the Earth over a few decades in the late 1900’s.
In the very first civilizations, people debated climate change just as we do now.
Both the Greeks and the 19th Century Americans debated ideas along the lines of whether chopping down trees would increase or decrease the rainfall to a region. Some Greek philosophers noted how the countryside had been experiencing harsher winters, and that they were killing the vegetation. But people assumed that humans were unable to affect the climate much, seeing as huge climate shifts happened all by themselves. One website mentioned how “The discovery of ice ages in the distant past proved that climate could change radically over the entire globe, which seemed vastly beyond anything mere humans could provoke” (AIP 1). Though mankind was relatively sure they were not able to cause such changes, they still didn’t know what did. Scientists tossed around various ideas, such as heat variation from the Sun, clouds of smoke from volcanoes, changes in mountain ranges, changes in wind patterns, changes in ocean currents, or possibly changes in the air composition itself, but were unable to prove any of them.
The idea that fossil fuels could possibly be involved in the heating of the world was slow in developing. In 1896 a Swedish scientist had the idea that “as humanity burned fossil fuels such as coal, which added carbon dioxide gas to the Earth’s [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] atmosphere, [humans] would raise the planet’s average temperature” (AIP 1). He called this theory the ‘greenhouse effect’, but it was only one of many ideas about climate change. The public was uninterested in the theories of various scientists, seeing as a dramatic change seemed unlikely to happen soon. In 1930, people began to realize that the United States and North Atlantic area had warmed up dramatically during the last half of a century. Many scientists argued that it was just a phase in the natural cycle, and happening for unknown reasons. However, scientist G.S. Callendar argued that the heat was because of the greenhouse effect (AIP 2). Despite the debate over the causes of the warming, most scientists agreed it could be a benefit if it kept happening for a few centuries, at a moderate rate.
In 1950, some scientists decided to dig deeper into Callendar’s idea of global warming. Using better techniques and calculations, as well as an increase in government funding, they started new studies. These studies eventually were resolved to find that
Carbon Dioxide was indeed able to build up in the Earth’s atmosphere and cause surface warming (AIP 2). As more and more measurements were taken, scientists in 1960 discovered that the level of gas trapped in the atmosphere was rising every year, instead of staying at a constant rate.
Scientists began making mathematical models of the climate in an attempt to understand the warming. Others studied ancient pollens and fossil shells to look for ways to possibly retrieve past temperatures. As the scientists continued their work, they decided that there was a high possibility of grave climate change within the next few centuries. Computer models, created because of a long-term effort to predict the weather, were made of the general circulation of atmosphere, which helped scientists forecast the
heat spikes. Because of the fact that “calculations made in the late 1960’s suggested that average temperatures would rise a few degrees within the next century. But the next century seemed so far off, and the models were preliminary” (AIP 2), the scientists decided there was no need for immediate legal action, apart from more effort in research.
The rise of environmentalism in 1970 encouraged public doubt about human effect on the planet. The growing curiosity about global warming lead to widespread concern and anxiety among the masses. Scientists decided to look at human activity causing dust and smog particles in the air as well as the greenhouse effect, arguing that the dust and smog would block the sun and counter the warming (AIP 2). The mass media took no definite stance, constantly switching between dramatic warming theories and predictions of a new ice age. Despite the public confusion, international panels continued to say that global warming was a severe threat. Though scientists were sure about the threat, they had no definite details, leading them to agree that they were in need of much more research. Oceanographic ships and orbiting satellites for data gathering were mobilized worldwide in an international effort to gather more information.
As scientists scrambled for a better understanding of the topic, many different ideas were reached. Volcanic eruptions and solar variations were still possibilities for the change in weather, along with changes in Earth’s orbit. Computer models desperately tried to figure out how jumps in temperature could happen, looking for connections with natural forces such as ocean currents. The media began predicting droughts, storms, and dramatic rises in sea levels. Scientists had no idea how living ecosystems, like coral reefs, would react to the new climate and atmosphere. Some scientists argued that the “Chaos” theory, which said that “a shift might even come all by itself” (AIP 1), was at the heart of [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] the matter, and that possibly the shift in temperature was just part of the universe being random. Many people debated over the effects of agriculture and deforestation, wondering if they were adding or subtracting Carbon Dioxide to the air. Once again scientists needed more research programs, but the funding for such programs grew in irregular surges, leading to lulls in their studies.
The US government mainly ignored climate change until Dr. James Hansen provided a testimony in front of the US Senate on June 23rd, 1988. This testimony stunned the public and finally convinced mass media of the reality of climate change.
“On all sides ‘global warming’ suddenly became the cause of the moment” (Booker 39).
Politicians began promoting climate change as one of the greatest disasters facing human kind, while mass media came off the fence to promote it as the truth, with no shadow of a question anymore. Even amongst Hollywood stars and the rest of show business; global warming became a topic everyone could support. Hansen’s testimony put the information scientists had gathered into dramatic terms, as he declared “the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements” (qtd. in Booker 39). This extreme announcement in front of the country lead to Hansen’s claims making headlines across the nation, just as his colleagues had hoped.
The research that scientists were doing on the atmosphere in 2007 to predict climate change was still very limited; however, they did manage to come up with a mathematical model for how long it would take for a major change to take place. While only theoretical, the equation “M=10^30” was used to describe the amount of years for
“an unchanging climate to regularly find two observed flows that match to within current observational error over a large area, such as the Northern or Southern Hemisphere” (Van
Den Dool 95). Most scientists finally agreed that it was going to be almost impossible to
“avoid a minimum of a 2 degree temperature rise this century” and that “we should simply accept that we’re already facing increases of at least 3 degrees and start preparing to adapt to those hotter and more extreme conditions” (19 Green/Minchin). The threat from global warming is not necessarily the fact that it causes extreme weather, but mainly that it will practically destroy locations that already experience extreme weather.
By 1988 scientists agreed that thought they were able to make extreme comments about what was happening at the moment, they needed better observations and computer models to try and project the outcome. The scientists were not sure how water vapors, cloudiness, smoke, and other pollution would affect climate change. The United Nations decided to establish the International Panel of Climate Control (IPCC) near the end of
1988. The IPCC’s main goal was to “assess the impacts of global warming and suggest strategies by which nations could curb carbon dioxide emissions” (Long 3). The IPCC’s work was groundbreaking, proving that the 10 warmest years in recorded history, which dated back 150 years, had happened during the 1980’s and the 1990’s. It also proved that the average global temperature had risen by 1 degree Fahrenheit during the 20th century, a dramatic change compared to the miniscule changes during the past few centuries. The
IPCC’s First Assessment Report (FAR) presented the conclusion that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would double in amount by around the middle of the 21st century, which would create the fastest climate change in the past 10,000 years.
The IPCC is a “huge and yet very small organization” (IPCC 1) to which scientists worldwide send information, and also review each other’s contributions. Work for the IPCC is entirely voluntary. Whenever the panel has major decisions to make, it [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] makes them at Plenary Sessions of government representatives. The organization is organized into 3 working groups and a task force. They are assisted by Technical Support
Units (TSUs). TSUs are hosted and financially supported by the government of the developed country co-chair of that working group and or task force. The working groups meet in the plenary session at the level of government representatives. Along with the working groups and task force, more task forces and steering groups can be created for various amounts of time to focus on a specific topic or question, and example of this is the Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impact and Climate Analysis (TGICA)
(IPCC 1).
As for the management of the IPCC, most decisions are made as a group, in panel sessions. In its 33rd session, the panel agreed to create an Executive Committee, as well as a Terms of Reference of the Bureau and a Roles, Responsibilities and Qualifications of
IPCC Bureau Members (IPCC 3). The rule for office is that there is only one term per office, like vice-chairs and co-chairs. The IPCC Secretariat is a position that should be appointed and not elected. In the 35th session, the IPCC clarified the functions of the
IPCC Secretariat and TSUs, also how the IPCC can participate in decisions on contract renewal, employment term limit, staff appraisal and recruitment for senior staff. The 33rd and 34th sessions adopted a Conflict of Interest Policy and the Implementation Annex
(IPCC 3).
The IPCC has multiple working groups, and each working group has its own specific task. Working Group One’s official job is to “assess the physical scientific aspect of the climate system and climate change” (IPCC 1). Its main topics are changes in greenhouse gases and aerosols in the atmosphere; observed changes in air, land and ocean
temperatures; rainfall, glaciers and ice sheets; oceans and sea level; historical and paleo- climatic perspective on climate change; biogeochemistry, carbon cycle, gases and aerosols; satellite data and other data; climate models, climate projections, and causes and attributions of climate change (IPCC 1). Working Group Two’s official job is to “assess the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change, negative and positive consequences of climate change, and options for adapting to it” (IPCC 1). They also look at the “inter-relationship between vulnerability, adaptation and sustainable development” (IPCC 1). The information is looked at by sectors, such as water resources, ecosystems, coastal systems, etc. It is also looked at by geographical regions, like Africa,
Asia, Europe, etc. (IPCC 1). Working Group Three’s job is to “assess options for mitigating climate change through limiting or preventing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing activities that remove them from the atmosphere” (IPCC 2). WG III takes into account the long and short-term economic factors, especially those included in energy, transport, buildings, industry, agriculture, forestry, and waste management. Group Three is more solution oriented, analyzing the costs and benefits of various approaches to mitigation, while also looking at the available instruments and policy measures.
Along with the three work groups (WG I, WG II, and WG III), the IPCC uses The
Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (TFI) to oversee the IPCC National
Greenhouse Gas Inventories Program (IPCC-NGGIP). Their goal is to “develop and refine an internationally-agreed methodology and software for the calculation and reporting of national GHG emissions and removals and to encourage its use by countries participating in the IPCC and by parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (the UNFCCC) (IPCC 2). The IPCC also established an Emission [Type text] [Type text] [Type text]
Factor Database, which is still in use. A TSU (Technical Support Unit) was created to support the IPCC Chair in preparing the Fifth Assessment Report’s Synthesis Report
(IPCC 2).
Scientists agreed on the conclusion that the temperature of the surface of our planet depends on a healthy balance of incoming radiation from the Sun, also known as solar radiation, and outgoing radiation from the surface of the Earth, known as terrestrial radiation (Long 8). The majority of heat energy produced by the Earth is absorbed by molecules of carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, CFC’s and ozone, which are known as the greenhouse gasses. What’s left of the heat energy manages to pass through the atmosphere back into space (Long 8). The greenhouse gasses are called
“greenhouse” for their ability to reflect and trap radiation better than any other gasses.
This reflected radiation is what bounces back down to the Earth’s surface, causing warming and a lower atmosphere. While greenhouse gasses may sound like a completely bad thing, without them the Earth’s average temperature would be much colder. If we did not have greenhouse gasses, the temperature could be a whole 59 degrees Fahrenheit lower than what it is now, and the planet would be unable to support the life that’s grown on it (Long 8).
In 2007, both the IPCC and Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on climate change. 25 groups have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the last
112 years, but most were for war efforts (nobelprize.org). In 2013 the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons won it, and in 2012 the European Union was awarded the prize, both for their efforts to prevent war. The majority of the organizations who did not win the prize through war, won it through humanities work. Some of these
organizations are Amnesty International (1977), International Labour Organization
(1969) and UNICEF (1965). The Red Cross also won the peace prize multiple times, such as in 1917, 1944, and 1963 (nobelprize.org). This is what made the IPCC’s achievement of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 special; no other organization had ever won it for any scientific work that was not weapons related.
The IPCC were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” (nobelprize.org).
The IPCC shared their prize with Al Gore, for his “tireless campaign to put the climate crisis on the political agenda” (nobelprize.org). The four reports that got the IPCC major attention stated that the climate change was accelerating, and that the changes are not natural, but man made. They also said that the need to start countering these changes is urgent if the world wants to prevent a crisis on an international level, one that could threaten the basis of human life (nobelprize.org). One of the main reasons that this research applied to the Peace Prize was that the danger of the severe climate change could possibly increase the threat of war, because already rare natural resources, including water, will be placed under extreme pressure. It will also cause large population migration as people try to escape drought, floods, and other intense weather conditions
(nobelprize.org).
In the mainstream media, there seemed to be two different opinions on the IPCC and Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Many people saw Gore winning the prize as unnecessary, seeing as he had won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary for his film “An Inconvenient Truth” which took his persuasive and solidly supported [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] arguments about climate change to the nation on a huge scale. The movie represented a large change in America’s general mindset towards climate change, it created such a strong effect that people all over the world started looking more carefully at their lifestyles and the future of our precious planet. The Chairman of the Peace Committee said that their goal is to “encourage all countries, including the big countries, and challenge them to think again and to say what they can do to conquer global warming”
(Dr. Mjoes qtd Gibbs/Lyall 1). The newspaper noted how the award had moved away from being oriented around armed conflict to peace more along the lines of social justice, poverty remediation and environmentalism (Gibbs/Lyall 1). The paper established that the reports released by the IPCC were “grim”, and a truth that should no longer be ignored. Though many critics claimed Gore being awarded the prize was a political move, the committee maintains that the prizes are apolitical (Gibbs/Lyall 2). The committee concluded that “action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control” (Committee qtd Gibbs/Lyall 2).
Other authors on the subject took a very different stance, making paranoid predictions about what’s to come, as well as attacking the very theory itself. One article frantically cried the impending doom of the warming being “sufficient to melt and dislodge the ice cover of West Antarctica … eventually leading to worldwide rise of 15 to 20 feet in the sea level” (Sullivan 1). At the same time as getting people all worked up and concerned about the possible flooding of up to a fourth of some states (such as
Louisiana and Florida), the media also did its best to poke holes in the theory in general.
Many people pointed out that “a cooling trend in recent decades was caused by dust from volcanic eruptions high in the atmosphere [and that] their model might be seriously
flawed” (Sullivan 2). These two opinions on greenhouse gasses and climate change could be found within the same newspaper, showing the wide variety of reactions to the IPCC’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize.
2009 graduate Christine Sim interviewed Jeannette Waddell on her perspective on environmentalism. Waddell is a member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment, Biogeography
Team. When asked what she thought was the biggest environmental issue of the day,
Waddell replied with “I think the one we have the least control over that is just looming and a 800 pound gorilla in every environmental issue is climate change. I think a lot of people call it global warming and even though that reflects the mean temperature of the planet and that’s why they call it global warming, it’s really climate change because we may very well see a much colder planet before long here. The fact is, is that humans have a major effect on climate and we don’t even realize the extent to which we’re altering ecosystems.” (Sim 28) This apt recognition of the crisis facing the world in 2008 and beyond allowed Sim to understand Waddell’s familiarity on the subject.
Following up on the topic, Sim asked what Waddell thought people could do to try and help with the climate. Waddell said “The little things we do everyday in turning off lights, and walking to the store instead of driving, you know, just the little that we do collectively, cumulatively have a huge impact. And we can all make more of an effort on that” (Sim 30). Waddell is sure that climate change is a threat not enough people are aware of, and that the IPCC reports are useful in showing people the facts. This interview shows how it is not only politicians and governmental panels who care about climate change; it’s people in many different professions. Though it is true that most people who [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] are into environmentalism have jobs involved with nature, there are plenty of lawyers and such that are just as concerned. In 2008, when this interview took place, climate change was still only slowly catching on as a real threat.
These days global warming is seen as a widely accepted truth, with only a few people still debating it. Global warming has become almost fashionable to care about; with worldwide encouragement for everyone to take his or her own steps to help. Things such as carpooling, using hybrid cars, and public transportation are popular ways for people to try and keep emissions down. Though no major legislation has been passed by the US Government, society in general has become much more aware of the issue.
Interview Transcription
Interviewee/Narrator: Jae Edmonds Interviewer: Claire Gregory Location: 5209 Wilson Lane, Bethesda, MD Date: January 4th, 2014
Claire Gregory: This is Claire Gregory and I am interviewing Jae Edmonds as part of
The American Century Oral History Project. The interview took place on January 4th,
2014, at 5209 Wilson Lane. First, can you tell me about your childhood?
Jae Edmonds: I was born in Chicago, Illinois, but by the time I was one my parents had moved to the suburbs, and I grew up in a little town called Barrington, that is northwest out of the city. There was a nearby railroad line, so my father could commute back and forth just like the metro, except it was the Chicago and Northwest railroad. It was a very nice place, we had a Methodist summer camp across the street from our house, and the
Methodists only met two weeks each year, so the rest of the time it was like your own private park.
CG: That’s cool
JE: So in the wintertime, like it is now, you would just go across and sled on the hills.
Couldn't have been much better. So I stayed there until I finished high school, and after high school I went on to college. I did four years at Kalamazoo College, got my bachelors [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] degree in economics, and then went on to graduate school in economics at Duke
University and finished that degree. Then I went on to teach for a year at a place called
Greensboro College in Greensboro North Carolina, and then went to the college of
Kentucky and taught there for four years and moved on to research, at a place called the
Institute for Energy Analysis. And then after the Institute for Energy Analysis went under
I moved to the Pacific North West National ?Laboratory? where I continue to work today.
CG: How did you get involved with the IPCC?
JE: Well the IPCC stands for Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, and I got involved with climate change because of the Institute for Energy Analysis. It was run by a physicist named Alvin Weinberg. Alvin had been part of the original physics brain trust; he was part of the Manhattan project, which built the fist atomic bomb. He was into nuclear power and he had a friend named Roger Revelle. Now Roger Revelle was one of the prime motivators for something called the Geophysical Year, which was 1958. And
Revelle’s idea was that there would be this global campaign to begin to measure what’s going on, on the planet. And so that’s where the first measurements of CO2 come from, it started in 1958 with the Geophysical Year. And David Keeling was the person charged with taking those measurements, and he was working at Scripps in La Jolla, California, so Alvin was pals with these people, and Alvin thinking that well the reason people aren’t concerned about planet change, Revelle’s first foray into this, and as time went on it became clear the concentrations were going up. They had these calculations that had been
done by some of the very earliest climate modelers that said this is what regularly these gasses, that are very small components of the atmosphere - which is mostly nitrogen -, control the surface temperature. They only had these very wide ranging observations; they had Venus where the concentrations were thousands of Parts Per Million, which of course is way too hot for any habitable life. And they had Mars where there was no carbon dioxide and so they had this cold planet. And then they had earth where they could do what was called a black body calculation where they could calculate what the temp of this ball rotating around a sun that has an energy output, you could figure out what the temp should be if there was jut a ball with no atmosphere. Its much colder than the surface temperature of earth, it should be around zero if I recall correctly. And that’s much colder than earth. So you have to explain why the earth is the 58 or 60 degrees that it is now. Why is it so much warmer? So you go through and you have these gasses and they have these interesting optical properties that sunlight comes in and that these ultraviolet wave lengths get absorbed by the surface of the planet and then gets reradiated and then in that shifted wave length that it’s reradiated in are the same gasses that it passed through unaffected now absorb some of the energy in that bandwidth. And so the energy reradiated and some of that re-radiation is passed back down towards the surface.
So that's the mechanism and so carbon dioxide is one of the gasses, it’s the biggest one that humans introduced, although water vapor is the most important of those. The carbon dioxide has this property, and so it’s a big controller of the surface temperature. And they knew that, so Alvin, knowing that the primary source was fossil fuel use, Alvin’s thing was that he wanted to encourage the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and so having come from this Manhattan Project he was interested in finding ways to use this energy [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] peacefully and he is the person that said originally that nuclear power would be too cheap to meter. That’s one of the things he was famous for. It didn’t turn out that way but that’s what he thought. And at that time people didn’t know what they know today. But his call was to have lots of nuclear reactors around, and so he thought wow you know that’s the solution to building up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you produce your electricity using that instead of coal you would be much better off, so he got very interested in that.
And so way back in the 1970s, before there was any general interest in the idea at all,
Alvin had this little program looking at this problem at this little institute, that’s where I got connected, because of just luck that there was ties between the school I was teaching economics at, and this institute so I got the chance to go there, to spend the summer, and work on some of these problems, ad it worked out well and so I spent more time working on the problems and eventually my teaching and the university moved on to just pure research on carbon dioxide. But it all starts back at this Institute for Energy Analysis, and as an economist the problem I found interesting was how much fossil fuel would be used, how much would be used and how much carbon dioxide could you anticipate being introduced into the atmosphere. And so the fist work I got involved with was to go look at that problem with the year 2000 as the future that people were concerned about.
Because if you looked at time trends of carbon dioxide emissions, they were growing in the aftermath of World War Two, there had been about 4 ½ % per year, if that had continued then well carbon dioxide would have been more like 550 Parts Per Million by the year 2000 we’d be well on our way toward maybe double that, 1000 Parts Per
Million, instead of where we’re at, which is a little bit below 400 Parts Per Million. That would have been the first very rapid change, so my original work was to look at it from
the perspective of energy, and we built some of the first models, computer models, of the global energy system working out on the entire scales, originally decades into the future, a century or more into the future. That was some of the first work that was looking at that problem and our conclusion was that things weren’t going to go so rapidly, and it was more likely to be at a slower pace, but there was no end in sight, so that was the way that
I got into the problem. The first introduction of the IPCC doesn’t start until 1989, when it was first created. The first IPCC assessment was primarily the natural science community, very into climate modelers, the carbon cycle (the existence of carbon in various forms, atoms, earth, oceans) but there was something called the response strategies working group which had this charge to think about what you would do, it this was a problem and so I was involved with that and worked on that. It didn’t have a formal report in the same way that working group one did, but it did create a report, but it didn’t go through that same process. But they began asking the question of how much carbon dioxide, and originally it was just carbon dioxide, would be released in the atmosphere. And so there were some calculations I was involved with. And so that first
IPCC assessment I was involved with that and I got involved because the IPCC grows out of this process that got started through a series of meetings that eventually culminated in
Toronto where the first politicians got involved in 1988, where you had some of the first senators, and congressmen coming up to Toronto and giving speeches about this. And that’s where I kind of come into it, I come in through that where it was created as one of the artifacts of the real treaty that the first president bush went down and helped create.
The IPCC comes out that same time, so that’s how I got into it.
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CG: So how do you think your reports, overall with the IPCC, affected the publics view on global warming and climate change?
JE: Well the charger of the IPCC is to do assessments, so their job is to look at the science and look at the literature and to describe what’s known, what’s uncertain, and what’s really not known. To describe what we know and what we don’t know, what were uncertain about and how uncertain we are. In general the IPCC has done a pretty good job of sticking to that charter, but once in a while you’ll get a leader who can’t recall whether or not they’re doing an assessment or espousing their own personal views, and that’s when the process gets into trouble. But in general it has stuck to that charter.
Particularly Working Group One where the physical science community (that’s their primary turf) have done well and over the years the evidence has become increasingly convincing that the planet is indeed warming that the source of that warming is human activities releasing these greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and that there is no end in sight to that process unless someone actually intervenes and that part about the active intervention is the piece that I come into, where we look at what our potential emissions that could be anticipated and originally all of the scenarios looking into the future were to be limited to what would happen if nobody did anything to stop it and so looking at how things could evolve and so that was the charter. In the most recent round, the rules changed and the scenario development process left the IPCC and went off to the research community and in reality that was the only piece of the research being done that the IPCC chartered that left the IPCC in an awkward place that they would charter research and make it happen and they would asses it, which was sort of a conflict of interest. So in the
most recent round, the research community emissions research got together with climate modelers and asked climate modelers what is it that they’d like to see, so what things would be most helpful to them looking foreword. That process lead to a range that spanned everything from nobody doing anything to very aggressive interventions and so those were the first scenarios and policies. Going back to your original question which is how that affected the public I think that in general the IPCC has a good reputation, it is viewed as a scientific body, and generally viewed to be unbiased. That’s not to say that the problem that was originally not a political problem hasn’t gotten incredibly politicized. In the recent years and it has become an article of faith for some people you see the "we" in climate change as if it were some kind of religious opinion, you cant believe in it and still be a good conservative and so that has become a problem in the politics of it. The public opinions has become increasingly strong its become overwhelming in terms of the science and so its become do you believe in science? And so science isn’t universally accepted as a way of knowing things so anyway it has made a lot of progress over the years.
CG: How did you and the rest of the IPCC feel about Al Gore before the 2007 peace prize?
JE: You know Al was an interesting character; he was almost counter to what I would have expected. He learned the science very well, and when he did his movie, if you go back and look at the move basically he does an excellent job of explaining the science.
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CG: It’s a great movie.
JE: Yeah and he does a good job and he understand that very well but his understanding of the politics was just woeful, I mean he really didn’t understand the political environment he was and I think he ended up setting back the whole climate change issue at least 10 years if not more. He did it by when he went to Kyoto, when they were the third conference of the parties for the framework convention of climate change that came out of the Rio treaties there was the first meeting in Berlin that made the mandate to try and figure out what to do, there was the second meeting in Geneva that sort of was considering options and the third was where they got down to serious negotiations and that was the Kyoto protocol that came out of it. He went to Kyoto and in the second week basically gave a speech and said well we'll cave in on all the negotiations, whatever the
Europeans and Japanese want we'll agree to. He was not thinking clearly, because any treaty has to go through the Senate and the Senate had voted that the they ere not going to agree to anything that didn’t include actions by developing continents and so Al Gore said you know I’m just going to cave in, and did two things; one he caved in a didn’t bring in the developing economy stuff in any meaningful way and some capability of bringing developing economies into litigations. And he failed where he agreed to emissions reductions that he couldn’t deliver that would be much more expensive for the
US than anything the Europeans were bringing to. And the Europeans negotiated very shrewdly, everybody referenced to 1990, and that was right before the collapse. And you bring in these Germans, and they shut down this convention, and that was right before the gas came in to the UK and so it was right before that, so they look back to this peak years
and they say they can get below that so they decide to get below that, as the US economy was growing and there was no expectation we could get below that without doing anything and so he agreed to a very stringent policy that he had no hope of getting through the Senate so he could look good in the Kyoto negations but he ended up being unable to actually deliver so he looked good and didn’t do anything and I think it was kind of the opposite of what you would have wanted.
CG: How did you guys feel about having to share the Nobel Peace Prize with him?
JE: Oh that’s not a problem, and for the IPCC it was an honor, it is a great honor to get the Nobel Peace Prize and the fact that it is a shared Peace Prize doesn’t in any way reduce that honor and so there’s certainly no jealousy or anything like that. That year they wanted to highlight climate change so they picked Al who had made it a personal crusade and the IPCC who invested all of this work. The money to make the IPCC run didn’t come out of the Nobel Peace Prize, that comes out of the government, its an intergovernmental panel so all the governments of the world were participating in that so the fact that you share it - actually if you ever come over to the house you’ll see up on the living room wall, they sent all of the people who had been lead authors in the reports they sent them a copy of the Peace Prize with their names on it and so I have one with my name on it for the IPCC so its up in the living room.
CG: Very fancy!
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JE: Yeah, it’s pretty neat.
CG: In my research I heard the terms "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm" a lot, could you explain what exactly those were?
JE: Yeah, those are periods when the temperatures change and so you have the Little Ice
Age was a cold period in Europe and the northern hemisphere, it is not as clear how extensive that was, but its certainly a climatological period in which you have this cooling going on and as an economist I’m not going to try and explain the climatology of those periods, it is something that the climatologists and the climate modelers can reproduce. I’m not going to try to explain how they reproduce it but those are both climatological cycles. In fact the curve in the context of our relatively stable climate period that has expanded over the last 10 thousand years and that’s actually why people have hypothesized that is why civilization formed, that the climate got stable that you didn’t have these periods where you were either extremely hot or extremely cold and volcanism has calmed down tremendously we haven’t had a super volcano in a long time.
So in this period of stable climate it has made it possible to be able to go year to year and be able to replicate things and so a lot of it has to do with something within agriculture, it really is this stable climate regime that’s been extremely useful to humans and the thing is worrying that the concentrations of carbon dioxide which remain over the last 10 thousand years within a very narrow band are now leaving that band and they’re leaving on the high side and of course the last time that the planet had concentrations of four hundred parts per million or more was millions of years ago and so this is a great
diversion from the experience that the climates had for a very long time, so its a big change, and part of the reason you haven’t seen much more change in the climate is that the oceans absorb a lot of the carbon dioxide, and over long term if you put out 100 times it they’ll absorb 80 of it and so they’re sort of our shock absorber. They’re also a thermal shock absorber in that as the planet takes a lot of energy to warm up the oceans and so they keep things sort of stable but they also work in the opposite direction if you get to the points where its too warm and you want to go back you have to take out 100 from the system to get 20 back, the ocean gives back in this attempt to stabilize. The other thing is that once the oceans get warmer they will stay warmer, and it takes a thousand years to bring the ocean back, so its a very long process. It’s a sort of tie scale that humans don’t think about, certainly politicians don’t think about.
CG: How did you feel about the Dr. James Hansen testimony before the US Senate in which he famously said “the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements”?
JE: He was kind of out there in that in a that was kind of the year when, same year as the
Toronto climate conference, there was a drop in the Midwest which kind of precipitated those Senate hearings and it was kind of out there but on the other hand he was sort of proved right by history you know that was getting warm here, but you had a lot of warm years since then and even though things have calmed own a bit in terms of climate change, we still continue the planet continue to assimilate greenhouse gasses so in some ways he was ahead of his time. He continues to be out there and he calls for things that [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] are probably beyond any reasonable expectations, and he wanted the co2 concentration to be reduced back to 350 parts per million and that’s going to take a lot of work and its unlikely to occur because of the reasons I just gave so there’s a lot of its touch to go back but it could be done but it would really require everybody on the planet ditching energy because this carbon dioxide is a well mixed gas to it doesn’t matter who puts it out there it finds its way to disperse around the planet sometimes it takes a little bit longer to go from North to South across the equator but still it will find its way and it’ll go around the planet it doesn’t matter where it goes, it all counts so that’s the problem.
CG: Do you feel like the public in general has gotten much better at preventing climate change compared to what they were doing before your reports came out?
JE: The problem is one that doesn’t lend itself to a solution by just changing people’s behavior, and that I think is not truly appreciated. People can pitch in and they can do things that slow the rate of which greenhouse gasses are emitted, and if everybody did everything that they possibly could as individual you could slow the rate at which the concentration rose, but you couldn’t stop it from rising. You couldn’t stabilize the concentration let alone bring it down, and the reason that you can’t it because big sources of emissions are the generators of electricity which the cheapest way to make is burning coal.
CG: Yeah
JE: So that’s the biggest single sources in the US, and generally in the world. Industrial emissions outside of the US are almost as big as in power generation and coal is use in places like China and India, where it is very abundant and it is the cheapest source of energy. And so even if you don’t use coal and you use gas, it’s also a fossil fuel. It doesn’t release as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy but it’s still carbon dioxide and that’s the problem with carbon dioxide, it accumulates. Every ton that you dug out took millions of years to build up under ground, and it is released in the course of a year, in a few minutes. And it will take another millions of years to remove it using nature’s processes. And so the time scales are a problem, so that’s a why its not just something that you’re going to be able to just get everybody to be good, and not worry about the manufacturing and processes and regulating those processes. That’s the politically difficult part, which you know it’s the cheapest way to do these things, there’s a lot of money on the line, the fuel and coal lines, so it is in your best interests to be skeptical of the science. The proper reaction would be you take electric utilities that are less concerned, all they’re concerned about it that everybody should be made to play by the same rules.
CG: Right.
JE: Because the thing that they can, that everybody can, do what we have to do to generate power. We do it a lot of different ways, it’s really the owners of the resources that become worthless if you can’t use them, and you know and they’re extraordinarily valuable. There’s a lot of money on the table and there are parts of the society that stand [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] to lose huge, huge, loads of the wealth, so that’s where the problem is and so it is its not going to be solved by people doing the right thing. It could slow things down, but it’s not going solve the problem, it does actually require governments to intervene and to put some kind of hard-edged limit on the pollutions. And it means that governments across the world, all the big emitters, have to do this, and that means that the Chinese have to get involved and that means the Indians have to get involved. I see the Chinese getting involved, but they’re concerned about other things like just plain old air pollution. But the
Indians are another matter, the Indian society is much more fragmented, it’s just that they have to eventually engage and you know the whole world all the big emitters have to get together.
CG: It has to be team effort.
JE: Right, and that’s not easy, there’s a lot of examples where that’s not happened, especially with climate change.
CG: Okay, so historian Sam White wrote, “Even historians uninvolved in climate-related research may consider how to incorporate climate in their classes. Environmental historians have an important role to play, not only in addressing the effects of climate change but also in placing the so-called climate debate in the framework of previous environmental policy and politics”, what do you think of this statement?
JE: Well that’s interesting, (both laugh) hmm so it sounds good to me, you know it is from a perspective of that strain of research that is you know very different from the kind of work that I do which is called Integrated Assessment in Climate Change, and we’re much more directly engaged, and so getting engagement is good. In fact the kind of work that we do would probably benefit the kind of work that he’s talking about because what we do is we try to put all these pieces together and try to understand how they all interact with each other, and if you do something in one place at one time, how that reverberates through the rest of the system and that’s a really good example of unexpected consequences, and I’m working on a paper right now where it’s clean developed an it goes back to they Kyoto protocol. The idea is to get developing economies engaged, and the way it’s done is that developing economies play by these rules. If they play by these rules they can create these assets that they can sell to economies that have emissions limitations, like the European Union and the European Union Trading System, and you can sell that to someone who has an obligation to reduce their emission and you can say well emissions were reduced over here and so the rules are typically that you have to make an investment in something that is better than what is currently being done. So typically that will be what’s the most recent investment in the suite of investments, what’s the average carbon dioxide emissions in the those investments and if you’re doing better than you get the difference and well one of things that happens because those because the way it is done is that you can sell that into the market you get to price in the market of those things and that means you’ve effectively subsidized these things to help lower emissions and when you subsidize the things with lower emissions, say in China you reduce the cost of generating electricity and so if you reduce the cost of things that [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] have lower emissions, they become a bigger share. But at the same time electricity is cheaper and so there’s more demand for electricity so there’s more demand for electricity so you produce more electricity that isn’t bound by the same rules and so its cheap to produce that in the cheapest way possible, which is likely to be the average of what you’ve been doing anyway without the subsidy so the constant quest is you get this tape back and it turns our that if the take back its big enough you actually made things worse and its generally pretty large and so in another year as a matter of fact is that you sell 10 tons into the system and you’ve actually reduced the emissions litigation by 9, because that action only got 1 net and so you got credit for 10 but the world only has 1 less and so what happens is that the people without it put a whole 10 up and so that’s the system.
Which is interconnected and things happening once place have these counter effects that you would’ve have anticipated you know we look at how these tings are all connected with each other and how they have effects that you would expect and some which you wouldn’t expect. It’s a fun thing to work on
CG: Pretty exciting! Okay so I think we’re good!
JE: Great!
Time Index Log
0 minutes ………………………………………………………………………. Childhood
5 minutes ……….....………………………………………...… Gasses in the Atmosphere
10 minutes …...………………………………………... The Institute for Energy Analysis
15 minutes ………………………………………………………………… Public Opinion
20 minutes …………..……………………………………………... Political Involvement
25 minutes ………………………………………………………………...……… Al Gore
30 minutes ………………………………………………………………...…. Climatology
35 minutes ………………………………………...... ……. Solution Issues
40 minutes …………………………………………………...…… Monetary Involvement
45 minutes …………………………………………………………… Global Connections
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Interview Analysis
A 2001 professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science is quoted as saying
“Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to [find a] way to scare the public” when talking about climate change. Oral history is a timeless way of keeping track of events, however it is far from perfect. While it has the advantage of being first person, oral history isn’t always the best way to find facts. This is due to the unavoidable occurrences of biases in eyewitness accounts. Many people could have experienced the same event, but each of them will have a different story of how it happened. This is what makes oral history important, that it not only tells us what happened but it tells us how different kinds of people reacted to it, which is just as crucial to understanding the moment as the pure facts are. Studs Terkel once said, “That’s what we’re missing. We’re missing argument. We’re missing debate.”
The great thing about the climate change movement was that it brought around plenty of debate. The political figures were willing to listen to what the scientists had to say, and the scientists were determined to be heard. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to both the IPCC and Al Gore together sent a powerful message to the world. It showed how critical the climate change situation was, and that major powers needed to start acknowledging it on a higher level. It generally improved public awareness of the subject, allowing the masses of the globe to see that global warming was no longer something they could brush off to deal with next century. My interview reinforced what other historians had said about the topic, that it was hampered by lack of political cooperation. However, my interview also pointed out how sometimes we need to look at
issues from the other point of view, to understand why people were reluctant to embrace global warming as a fact.
In my interview, Mr. Edmonds tended to focus on both explaining how global warming worked from a scientific standpoint, and why people were so determined to look the other way. Most people in the early 1950’s did not have the vaguest idea of why the earth seemed to be gaining heat. Mr. Edmonds explained the basics of global warming when he explained how gasses have interesting optical properties where “sunlight comes in and that these ultraviolet wave lengths get absorbed” (Edmonds qtd in Gregory 20) by the earths surface. The gasses then get reradiated and in that slightly shifted wave length, some of the gasses that had passed through the atmosphere before are now absorbed. So the energy that was reradiated is passed back down to the surface of the planet. Mr.
Edmonds felt as if a big part of the reason that people did not originally embrace the idea of global warming was because they did not understand how it worked. Another thing that Mr. Edmonds pointed out was how the Institute for Energy Analysis, started by
Alvin Weinberg, had really been the start of the scientific movement about climate change. The Institute for Energy Analysis was where Mr. Edmonds got connected to the topic, and where a lot of the eventual members of the IPCC started out. Mr. Edmonds mentioned how the main reason not much political action had been created in the way of climate change was because it has become a very sensitive topic, almost a religious topic.
Mr. Edmonds explained this evolution of climate change when he stated that the main problem was not originally political, but it has become much more politicized recently. It has become “an article of faith” for some people, almost a religious opinion. Mr.
Edmonds points out how you can’t believe in climate change and still be a “good [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] conservative” (Edmonds qtd in Gregory 24) and so that is a big issue in the politics of it.
Many politicians didn’t want to address the issue of climate change because it would mean spending government funds on what at the time was just a theory. Some politicians eventually came around to the idea, and one of those politicians was Al Gore. Al Gore was a big part of helping people understand the science, but Mr. Edmonds argued that
Gore was not actually useful on the political side of things. Gore “agreed to a very stringent policy that he had no hope of getting through the Senate” (Edmonds qtd in
Gregory 26), which made Gore look good in the negotiations at Kyoto, yet Gore was unable to deliver. This made Gore look good without actually doing anything, which was the opposite of what was needed.
Burning fossil fuels is the cheapest way to create energy, so it was easier for politicians to pretend the issue wasn’t there. When politicians worldwide finally accepted climate change as a fact, it was a huge win for the IPCC. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was the committee’s way of showing the world what they thought was most important that year.
The award honored the IPCC for providing the scientific proof of climate change, and Al
Gore for helping the world realize the truth in the IPCC reports.
A large part of the battle to get anything done about climate change was creating public awareness. Most people didn’t want to face the fact that the world is heating up, let alone that humans were a major source of that heating. As Paul Watson, one of the founders of Greenpeace, once said, “it doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true” (National Center 1). The IPCC had a big part in changing what people thought to be true. Before the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, the public was stubbornly ignoring climate change. The IPCC’s reports helped convince people that climate change
was real and relevant to their daily lives. Sadly, as Mr. Edmonds said, “The problem is one that doesn’t lend itself to a solution by just changing people’s behavior” (Edmonds qtd in Gregory 29). Though raising public awareness and support of the issue helped a huge amount, climate change cannot be dealt with so easily. Even if every person in the world began limiting their use of fossil fuels individually, it wouldn’t be enough. Both
Paul Watson and Mr. Edmonds were right, the publics view on the matter is highly important to the subject, however big companies and corporations need to pitch in to make any meaningful change.
On the political side, passing legislation about climate change proved near impossible. Since burning fossil fuels was so much cheaper than other sources of energy, politicians were reluctant to admit that climate change was even real. It was easier to ignore the issue than to shell out the funds needed to create even a small dent in it.
Reporter Rupert Darwall, a writer for The Wall Street Journal, said “none of the climate scientists involved [in the IPCC] seems embarrassed at this nonsense or protests at the manipulation of science for political ends” (Darwall 1) in a recent article. The fact that this article came out so recently (September 2013) shows how many political figures is still hesitant to take climate change seriously. The article claims that the IPCC reports are being dramatized, basically arguing that global warming is not as important as scientists are saying it is. When asked about the government’s denial of climate change for so long,
Mr. Edmonds explained that denial is “The cheapest way to do these things … it is in your best interests to be skeptical of the science” (Edmonds qtd in Gregory 30). This statement sums up the government’s views on global warming, that it’s easier to look the other way. From an economic standpoint it makes sense to ignore the science, because it [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] allows countries to continue using cheap fossil fuel energies. There are two sides to every story, those who argue for saving government funds and those who want to spend it on a practical project. In this story, it’s the IPCC verses the skeptics, and we don’t know who is going to win.
This process taught me that history is not just a page in a textbook. It is a living part of life. History is every single day, not just the moments in the distant past. The process of recording someone’s story, of marking down forever his or her memories proved that life means something. Not every person is going to be a hero, or a public figure, but every person deserves to be remembered. Oral history is one of the amazing ways that we as a race keep track of each other. Each memory adds another piece to the complicated puzzle of life, and collecting the pieces is a vital job. The whole process helped me learn a bit more about who I am as a person. I am not a charming extrovert who conducts interviews easily. I am not the worlds most amazing writer nor storyteller.
But I am able to listen. I am able to record. And I am able to report my findings, even if
I’m no Howard Zinn. This project has shown me that everyone has their own strengths, and that everyone can find a way to apply their skills for the greater good. Each person is unique in how they handle the project, but in the end the result is equally valuable. All of these projects are just as important to history as a whole, to the world as a whole.
Works Cited
AIP.org. AIP, 2010. Web. 5 Dec. 2013.
Andrew, Revkin. "2 Winners, and 2 Approaches to Spreading the Word on Climate."
New York Times: n. pag. Print.
Booker, Christopher. The Real Global Warming Disaster. London: Continuum
International, 2009. Print.
Cohen, Patricia. "The Politics Behind the Peace Prize." New York Times: n. pag. Print.
Darwall, Rupert. "The Political Science of Global Warming." Wall Street Journal: n. pag.
Print.
"The Discovery of Global Warming (A Hypertext History of How Scientists Came to
Partly Understand What People Are Doing to Cause Climate Change)." AIP. N.p.,
n.d. Web. 2014.
Edmonds, Jae, and John M. Reilly. "Global Energy." New York Times: n. pag. Print.
Edmonds, James. Personal interview. 3 Jan. 2014.
Frugal Café Blog Zone. N.p., n.d. Web. 2014. cafe.com/public_html/frugal-blog/frugal-cafe-blogzone/2011/02/13/cold-as-ice- global-warming-political-cartoon-son-of-scam-roundup/>. Gertner, Jon. "The Future Is Drying Up." New York Times: n. pag. Print. Gibbs, Walter, and Sarah Lyall. "Gore Shares Peace Prize for Climate Change Work - Nobel Also Honors Panel of Scientists from the U.N." New York Times [New York] 13 Oct. 2007: n. pag. Print. [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] Gore, Al, perf. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do about It. Lawrence Bender Productions, Participant Productions, 2006. Film. Green, Donna, and Liz Minchin. Screw Light Bulbs. Cawley: UWa, 2010. Print. Gregory, Claire Y. “Global Climate Change: It’s Getting Hot in Here; an Oral History of the IPCC’s work to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize” 11 Feb. 2014. MS. American Century Oral History Project. St. Andrew’s School, Potomac. IPCC. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Dec. 2013. A>. IPCC. Global Energy Technology Strategy: Addressing Climate Change. Comp. Richard Balzhiser et al. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. IPCC/GTSP. Global Energy Technology Strategy: Addressing Climate Change: Phase 2 Findings. By J. A. Edmonds et al. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. IPCC History. IPCC, n.d. Web. 2014. Long, Douglas. Global Warming. New York: Facts on File, 2004. Print. Lynn, Jonathan, and Werani Zabula. Statement about the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. Mithen, Steven, and Eva Swidler. After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5,000 BC. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. Nash, L. The Environmental Movement: Struggling for Safety and Protection. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. National Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 2014. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Foundation, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2013. The Reference Frame. N.p., n.d. Web. 2014. and-al-gore-wins-nobel-peace-prize.html>. Sim, Christine. Is the Global Environment Deteriorating?: An Oral History of Environmentalism. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. Sullivan, Walter. "Study Finds Warming Trend That Could Raise Sea Levels." New York Times [New York] 22 Aug. 1981: n. pag. Print. Think Progress. N.p., n.d. Web. 2014. organizations-winning-nobel-peace-prize/>. Van den Dool, Huug. Empirical Methods in Short-Term Climate Prediction. Oxford: Oxford University, 2007. Print. Weart, Spencer R. Global Warming, Cold War, and the Evolution of Research Plans. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. [Type text] [Type text] [Type text] Appendix This political cartoon depicts the mockery aimed at Al Gore after the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Many people didn’t think his work had merited the award compared to previous winners of the Peace Prize. This political cartoon shows how many people still saw Global Warming as a myth even after Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. They believed that Gore had manipulated the committee into giving him the prize for something that was not even a fact.