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the key role of "official" assessments
Over the last two decades there have been roughly a hundred or so published greenhouse warming evaluations and assessments. Almost all have been prepared by single governments or by nongovernmental organizations. Almost all have carried the strong flavor of the perspectives and viewpoints of the entities producing them. Almost all have been virtually ignored on the global scene, apparently because those evaluations were perceived as not credible to entities other than those who wrote them. It was clear that US-based evaluations, including the most recent one (15), were regarded with some mistrust by other countries.
In the ozone-depletion problem, there was a similar history. This pattern was broken, however, with the first truly international ozone assessment (16), sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization. This effort was empowered by a large increase in participation by the world ozone science community and, thus, in the authority of the assessment. An encouraging result was a marked increase in the level of attention and action by the world policy community. In contrast to the current greenhouse warming situation, however, ozone depletion awareness escalated rapidly thereafter, with the 1985 (17) documentation of the Antarctic "ozone hole," a veritable smoking gun that showed the actual problem to be much more severe than had previously been predicted by the ozone science community.
The viability of the greenhouse warming assessment process was strongly improved following the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and its report on Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment in 1990 (14). The IPCC process substantially changed the way the world policy-making and decision-making communities deal with the greenhouse warming issue. The internationalization of the process led to a common platform in which the major contributors to this problem (essentially all human beings) can begin to discuss ways to cope with its implications. In spite of the predictable nit-picking (too aggressive, too timid, too political, insufficiently 101 political), IPCC has proved to be an enormous international success, at least in my opinion.
The IPCC process and its assessment products were far from an instant success. When the 1990 IPCC Report was released, it received a small mention in a back page of the New York Times. Almost no other newspapers picked up the story. In effect, it was a nonevent in the US media. Ironically, the impending 1990 IPCC Report had been a very large event in the personal lives of the reporters who were covering the high-amplitude stories that were fueling the greenhouse warming controversy. The reporters had been chasing some assertions that the IPCC report might reach some startling new conclusions. Those of us being interviewed by reporters almost daily before the release of the 1990 IPCC Report experienced a precipitous drop in the frequency of interview requests after the release. My colleagues and I inferred that the IPCC Report was apparently "too dull" to receive major interest from the press. In effect, IPCC was saying what climate scientists had been saying for some time: The greenhouse warming problem is real; human-caused climate change could be substantial; the climate models are credible; and the science has significant uncertainties that must be recognized. I later asked some reporters about this and they acknowledged that our inferences were correct. Without major changes in the public perception of this problem, it was not seen by the reporters as being very newsworthy. In effect, the controversy was much more interesting "news" than the problem itself. The need of the media to find intense and newsy stories had unfortunately overwhelmed whatever obligations it may have had to inform its readers about the significance of the IPCC conclusions.