Rio Earth Summit

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SEE FORK 1

NO MERRI

my rough notes:

Bush 41 himself of course was a new england preppie rich kids cosplaying texas coyboy/oil man [pork rinds and all). Chevron and Enron and halliburton funders; he followed the law on National Climate Assessment his son would suppress, and attended Rio Summit, however reluctantly. Some binding measures? Bush refused to sign bio-diversity treaty for fear of hurting pharma; ideas previously seen as fringe became more mainstream, and set the stage for Kyoto; split on rich vs poor countries presage Copenhagen fail?

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TRUMP KILLS

1 25 MORANO

gmail

pull out of 66 orgs

Trump withdraws US from 66 organizations, including UN climate treaty | Fox News Video

1992 rio will req senate re-ratification; un pop fund, ipcc pol body masquerade as from ---take orders from pols; will save us $ bimbo rachel brn hair prolly shd pull out of un altogether; state limit number mi crush totalitarianism mass; mass state 15 member cncl; biden ev mandate trying to take away your freedom of movement; davos trying to get rid of cars, colo CA, limit gas station; carbon passport to monitor your travel; gubt will check your mi to see if you too much; life is hwy bimbo

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11 25 netflix the wh effect

sununu out, but bad effects k?

overpromise in campaign, underpromise in office/ policy. meaning?

b41 pushed to rio JEJ promo in theatres; paraiah at rio

reporter asked about US pressure, our guy says we never do --> ha

bromley

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United Nations Earth Summit held inRio de Janeiro from June 3-14 1992.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21

NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/keyword/earth-summit/4

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10 years on:

5. TEN YEARS ON, THE RIO "CIRCUS" HEADS FOR SOUTH AFRICA

ENN

16 August 2002

Internet: http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/08/08152002/reu_48156.asp

LONDON - Jane Fonda, the actress, was there. So was Pele, the footballer. A relatively obscure U.S. senator called Al Gore swung into town and looked impressed at a symbolic "Tree of Life." John Denver sang for a spiritual parliament. Hollywood star Shirley MacLaine meditated with the Dalai Lama. Amazon Indians, Greenpeace activists, and the Beach Boys rubbed shoulders near the legendary Copacabana Beach. Ten years ago, the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro teemed with politicians, celebrities, and environmentalists as the United Nations hosted what was at the time its largest meeting, the Conference on Environment and Development, better known as the Earth Summit. One hundred and eight heads of state and government, supported by delegations from 172 countries, made speeches and negotiated in a conference center out of town on treaties to save the world. Buzzwords like sustainable development, chlorofluorocarbons, biodiversity, and NGO bounced around the halls, where an army of journalists tried to make sense of them. The NGOs, or nongovernmental organizations, lobbied in their hundreds, adding to the blizzard of position papers, speeches, and statements. Some miles away, on the Rio beachfront, thousands of Green activists gathered at an environmental fair, a rainbow of posters and T-shirts that was part '60s hippie love-in and part anti- globalization rally. In the shadow of Corcovado's towering figure of Christ the Redeemer and Sugar Loaf's massive outcrop, activists demanded protection for rain forests and endangered species, an end to fossil fuels and the nuclear industry, and the general scaling back of the ravages of capitalism. One U.S. official described the whole event as "a circus." It was not meant as a compliment.

JOHANNESBURG BOUND

Ten years on, and the Earth Summit - this time called the World Summit on Sustainable Development - moves to South Africa, where it will open in Johannesburg on Aug. 26. The issues will be water and sanitation, energy, agricultural productivity and food security, biodiversity and ecosystem management, and health. All will be wrapped under the rubric of sustainable development - or, roughly, how to manage global economic growth without environmental loss. A decade ago, the leaders also had far-reaching plans. They agreed to treaties to combat climate change and to protect plants and animals, the rich said they would help the poor develop, and they all adopted a huge blueprint to guide themselves through it. But there are few today who would argue that the promises of Rio have been met. "There was really quite a buzz at Rio," said Tony Carritt, who attended the summit as a reporter and is now media relations manager for the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen."There was a feeling that things would actually happen. Then as soon as Rio was over the momentum went out of it." Most, if not all, of the major issues facing the Earth Summit - pollution, environmental destruction, poverty - are still around. Indeed, many of the clashes between competing interests that dominated Rio are expected to be on display once again. The U.S. official's comments about a "circus" in 1992, for example, reflected Washington's dismay at hearing a drumbeat of demands that the rich West share its wealth with the poor and adopt policies that it did not necessarily see as being in its interests.Then-President George Bush refused to sign the Earth Summit's biodiversity treaty, fearing it would hurt U.S. pharmaceutical interests, and generally found himself cast in the role of Rio party-pooper. A decade later, his son, President George W. Bush, may not even attend and has been lambasted for pulling out of the Kyoto agreement, a follow-on pact from Rio's treaty on climate change.

HIGH PROFILE

Veterans of Rio say, however, that the Earth Summit did have one huge effect: It put many issues that only environmentalists seemed to care about on the world agenda. "Rio changed a lot in terms of attitude," said Nitin Desai, U.N. undersecretary general, who is organizing the Johannesburg summit. "Today one does not have to argue the case for integrating environment and development." The issue of sharing the wealth between developing and developed countries - a key dispute at Rio - has come to dominate most global summits and international negotiations. It was most clearly on display last year in Qatar, when the World Trade Organization met to negotiate the launch of a new trade round.

"Rio was in some senses a 'first one,'" said Desai, who expects tens of thousands of nongovernmental activists to show up in South Africa to fight their causes on the sidelines of the official meeting. "One of the things that has changed is that summits are not seen just as summits of government, but of stakeholders," he said. Global warming, the ozone layer, rain forest destruction, the spread of deserts, and the effect of poverty on the environment are all now common subject for debate, 10 years after Rio. "A lot of things that were considered screamer environmentalist are now accepted as part of the economic reality," said Abby Spring, who was press officer for the U.S. arm of the World Wide Fund for Nature at the Earth Summit. It was not always so. Spring recalled the reaction before Rio when she tried to get journalists interested in the now widely accepted concept that pollution was changing the climate. "Reporters would hang up on you and think it was a joke," she said.

Rio Earth Summit

In the early '90s, Burson-Marstellerwas instrumental in setting up, and subsequently representing, the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD), whose members include Chevron, Volkswagen, Ciba-Geigy, Mitsubishi, Dow Chemicals, Du Pont, and Shell. B-M’s mission was togreenwash the image of big business in the run-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and to ensure that the meeting passed no binding regulations to restrict transnational corporations.

The BCSD was headed by Stephen Schmidheiny. The Swiss billionaire industrialist was a close friend of the secretary-general of the UN Council on Environment and Development (UNCED). BCSD heavily lobbied UNCED at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, pushing for participants not discuss or even circulate proposals drawn up by the UN's own Center for Transnational Corporations concerning the environmental impact of these large companies and issues of corporate responsibility and accountability. The efforts help kill efforts to impose accountability on the TNCs, and kept climate change off the agenda.

In 1994 the BCSD merged with the World Industry Council for the Environment. WICE was another industry front group created by theInternational Chamber of Commerce to promote the industry agenda at Rio. It became the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, which continues to oppose enforceable environmental legislation, and pushes for voluntary corporate action on environmental issues. (Europe Inc., Pluto Press, p151)

sw:

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio Summit, Earth Summit (or, in Portuguese, Eco '92) was a major United Nations conference held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to June 14, 1992.

Contents[hide]

Resources

John McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement (1991, Indiana University Press).
David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction (Routledge, 1996).
Timothy Doyle, “Sustainable development and Agenda 21: the secular bible of global free markets and pluralist democracy,” Third World Quarterly, 19 (4), 1998.

[edit] Resources and articles

References

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=United_Nations_Conference_on_Environment_and_Development"

Categories: United Nations | Environment

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio Summit, Rio Conference, Earth Summit (Portuguese: Eco '92) was a major United Nations conference held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 June to 14 June 1992.

Contents[hide]

[Overview

172 governments participated, with 108 sending their heads of state or government.^[1] Some 2,400 representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) attended, with 17,000 people at the parallel NGO "Global Forum", who had Consultative Status.

The issues addressed included:

systematic scrutiny of patterns of production — particularly the production of toxic components, such as lead in gasoline, or poisonous waste including radioactive chemicals
alternative sources of energy to replace the use of fossil fuels which are linked to global climate change
new reliance on public transportation systems in order to reduce vehicle emissions, congestion in cities and the health problems caused by polluted air and smog
the growing scarcity of water

An important achievement was an agreement on the Climate Change Convention which in turn led to the Kyoto Protocol. Another agreement was to "not carry out any activities on the lands of indigenous peoples that would cause environmental degradation or that would be culturally inappropriate".

The Convention on Biological Diversity was opened for signature at the Earth Summit, and made a start towards redefinition of money supply measures that did not inherently encourage destruction of natural ecoregions and so-called uneconomic growth.

Twelve cities were also honoured by the Local Government Honours Award for innovative local environmental programs. These included Sudbury in Canada for its ambitious program to rehabilitate environmental damage from the local mining industry, Austin in the United States for its green building strategy, and Kitakyūshū in Japan for incorporating an international education and training component into its municipal pollution control program.

The Earth Summit resulted in the following documents:

Rio Declaration on Environment and Development^[2]
Agenda 21^[3][4]
Convention on Biological Diversity^[5]
Forest Principles
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Both Convention on Biological Diversity and Framework Convention on Climate Change were set as legally binding agreements.

Critics, however, point out that many of the agreements made in Rio have not been realized regarding such fundamental issues as fighting poverty and cleaning up the environment.

The Green Cross International was founded to build upon the work of the Summit.

[edit] References

^ Earth_Summit
^ http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21/rio-dec.htm
^ http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21/english/agenda21toc.htm
^ http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21/
^ http://www.cbd.int
^ http://www.earthsummit2012.org/
^ http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6286

[edit] External links

video: George Hunt reviews UNCED 1992

Address at Rio Earth Summit, Dalaï Lama

B-M's most powerful and influential 'environmental' client is the Business Council for Sustainable Development(BCSD), an eco-capitalist outfit founded by Swiss banker Stephan Schmidheiny. A leading theorist and advocate of neoliberal dogma and corporate environmentalism, Schmidheiny agressively combines entrepreneurship and statesmanship. He is a board member of NestlE9, and a director and shareholder (5% owner) of B-M client Asea Brown Boveri.

BCSD's original task was to act behind the scenes at the 1992 Earth Summit, which was chaired by the current head ofB-M client Ontario Hydro Maurice Strong, to neutralize and silence any voices critical of the irresponsible behavior of polluting corporations. In the words of Joyce Nelson, "With the able assistance of public relations giant Burson-Marsteller, a very elite group of business people (including B-M itself) was seemingly able to plan the agenda for the Earth Summit with little interference from NGO's or government leaders". Nowadays BCSD is advocating free markets and unfettered corporate activity as the only salvation of the environment. Its members include the CEO's of Asea Brown Boveri, Browning Ferris Industries, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, DuPont, BCFA member Mitsubishi, Maurice Strong's Ontario Hydro, Royal Dutch-Shell, and companies from Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Spain, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Thailand and Venezuela.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-a-environment/233511-rio-earth-summit-then-and-now

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - Today, world leaders are gathered in Rio de Janeiro to mark the20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit. Looking back, it is clear that the excitement and energy of that moment two decades ago, and the ambitious goals we set, have not yet put us on a path to a sustainable planet. But the many critics and pundits who take pleasure in stressing the futility of these conferences will be missing half the story.

In the 20 years since we first met in Rio, the concept of “sustainable development” has evolved from theory to increasingly common practice. In particular, the world’s fast-growing nations are embracing many tenets of sustainability as core to their economic development strategy. At this year’s summit, world leaders would be wise to focus on how to replicate and accelerate this trend around the world.

Before the 1992 summit, Brazil’s President Color told me that 65 heads of state were waiting to learn whether President Bush would attend the conference before committing to participate. President Bush went, and world leaders (plus 10,000 journalists) followed, with important results. Rio built awareness about humanity’s growing environmental impact, inspired a generation of activists and entrepreneurs, and concluded major global treaties.

The whiff of politics was omnipresent at that first gathering, as it will be this year. When Fidel Castro concluded his speech -- largely an attack on the United States -- President Bush applauded. Asked how he could explain his response, Bush said, “we were all allotted only 6 minutes. I didn’t think he could do it.”

For those of us involved in the 1992 conference, the anniversary is bittersweet. We have not slowed, yet alone reversed, the increasing pace of ecological destruction. Greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are more than 20 percent higher than they were in 1992, when nations first committed to reduce emissions. The planet has lost an additional 270 million acres of forest—an area twice the size of France. The world continues to consume natural resources at an unsustainable pace.

From floods to wildfires to famine, we are already witnessing the serious, adverse implications of unsustainable economic activity. We have yet to fully grasp these implications, but one thing is clear: the ability of our natural systems to sustain human civilization will come into question in just the next few years and decades. To prevent the looming crises of resource scarcity, climate change, and ecosystem collapse, we must shift the way economies value and protect natural resources.

Yet, especially in recent years, there are important signs of progress. Brazil has reduced deforestation in the Amazon more than 75 percent since 2004. China and Germany lead the world in renewable energy. Korea is trying to win the race to develop and export green technologies. India is betting on solar and wind power to lift many rural poor out of poverty.

Around the world, people today are far more likely than in 1992 to believe that sound environmental policies actually bolster economic growth, rather than harm it. The personal experience many have had with these policies offers proof positive: Well-designed energy efficiency standards for vehicles, appliances, and buildings, for example, reduce air pollution and carbon emissions, save money, improve energy security, and raise living standards. Investments in technology innovation can accelerate the pace of resource protection by doing more with less – and by reducing the cost of alternatives to resource extraction, such as renewable energy. Policies that encourage more intensive agriculture – using drip irrigation, for example - can increase crop yields and improve farm incomes while reducing soil erosion, runoff, wetlands loss, and deforestation. Though some of these ideas – like pollution taxes - may remain controversial in the United States, the U.S. is increasingly the exception rather than the norm.

Nations across the world better understand today that solutions depend on harnessing the creativity, energy, determination, and capital of the private sector. At the first Earth Summit, poor nations clamored for more foreign aid. Today, they want more private investment and more trade. This revolution in thinking was barely imaginable in 1992.

World leaders need to capitalize on this progress and take bold strides to address increasingly urgent planetary threats.

For the first time, nations should set clear, ambitious and measurable objectives for sustainable growth. Compelling goals are a precondition for success, as any business leader knows. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s proposal to ensure universal access to cleaner energy, double renewable energy production, and double energy efficiency improvements by 2030 offer a good starting point. Similar goals are required in other sectors.

Nations also need to change the way they measure progress. The World Bank estimates that one third of the wealth of low-income nations lies in their “natural capital” – their rivers, forests, grasslands, wetlands, and estuaries. Exploiting these resources for short-term gain is not progress; it’s more akin to raiding a retirement portfolio to pay current expenses. Likewise, economic policies must encourage investments in innovation -- we are only beginning to tap the power of technology to tackle global challenges.

World leaders should ensure that any country that marshals the political will to take ambitious action receives technical support from the international community. Several decades ago, the international community created a network of experts to spread modern agricultural practices, the so-called green revolution; millions applied this know-how and escaped poverty. Today, a similar effort is needed to promote clean energy policies and know-how around the world with a comparable aim. Efforts like the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All are a big step in the right direction, but need more support and emphasis from the international community.

Twenty years ago, we had to invent the policy tools and institutions required for sustainability. We have largely accomplished that. What is missing now is the political will and vision to use those tools to grow responsibly. It is arguably the greatest leadership question of our time.

Reilly, who served as EPA Administrator under George H. W. Bush, headed the U.S. delegation to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. He is chairman of the ClimateWorks Foundation.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-a-environment/233511-rio-earth-summit-then-and-now#ixzz2f5bng0Rh

The message couldn’t have been clearer. The activists were shot, execution style, on the same day in May 2011 that Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies passed a rewrite of the Forest Code, the law governing economic activity in the Amazon. Zé Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo, a married activist couple, were gunned down near their forest home in Pará, in northeastern Brazil. They were the latest of the more than 1,600 activists who have been killed in the Amazon since 1985, including Chico Mendes, the rubber-tapper and political organizer whose 1988 assassination drew worldwide condemnation.

Like Mendes, Ribeiro had received numerous death threats and predicted his own murder. In November 2010 the forest defender told an audience in Manaus [1], “I could get a bullet in my head at any moment…because I denounce the loggers.” Police immediately suspected that Ribeiro’s death was a professional hit, because his corpse, like his wife’s, had one ear cut off; in the Amazon, killers customarily present their paymasters with a victim’s ear to prove the deed was done. Hours later, when a legislator took the floor in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies to urge an investigation, he was booed by members of the ruralista caucus, lawmakers allied with the large landowners who advocate maximum exploitation of the Amazon.

An ominous sense of déjà vu hovers over the United Nations Rio+20 conference on sustainable development taking place June 20–22. Twenty years ago, Rio de Janeiro hosted the landmark 1992 Earth Summit, which framed the problem that Rio+20 re-examines: how to reduce global poverty while preserving the planet’s life-support systems. Alas, two decades later, the Amazon remains a lawless place, where criminals loot natural resources with abandon and violent intimidation of activists is common. (A current example is forest defender Nilcilene Miguel de Lima, who, as reported by Brazil’s Publica news group [2], got so many death threats the government gave her twenty-four-hour security protection, then moved her to an undisclosed location.)

Internationally, too, the parallels between Rio+20 and the Earth Summit are disturbing. Like George H.W. Bush in 1992, President Obama refused to say for weeks whether he would attend the Rio conference, much less try to rally the world to avert planetary catastrophe. On June 12 a State Department announcement made it official [3]: Obama will not go. When Bush was trying to duck the summit in 1992, major media outlets ran a slew of stories reminding him of the potential impact on his re-election efforts,which helped change his mind. Obama has faced no such flak for being a Rio no-show.

Why should he? After all, Rio+20 is only talking about the end of the world as we know it. A new study in the journal Nature warns that Earth is approaching a “tipping point” that could lead, within decades, to irreversible degradation of the natural systems that provide humans with food, water and other vital services. A team led by Anthony Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley, found that the rapidly warming climate, the disappearance of countless plant and animal species, the spread of toxic “dead zones” in the oceans, and other disturbing trends could trigger a transition to a radically less hospitable planet that would be “extremely difficult or even impossible” to reverse.

Yet it’s no mystery how to tackle these problems, either in Brazil or globally. The rate of deforestation in the Amazon has actually been falling, making Brazil the world’s leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. According to satellite imagery from Brazil’s space agency, “Between 2006 and 2010, Brazil reduced Amazon deforestation about two-thirds below the annual average from 1996 to 2005, reducing about 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution,” writes Steve Schwartzman [4], who as director of tropical forest policy for the Environmental Defense Fund has worked in the Amazon for decades. He credits tougher law enforcement initiated under Marina Silva, the former environment minister (and an activist ally of Mendes before entering government). Tatiana Carvalho of Greenpeace Brazil cites another reason: a Greenpeace campaign that persuaded global companies not to buy soy from Amazon clear-cutters.

However, in response to tougher law enforcement, the ruralistas set out to gut the Forest Code, says Schwartzman. The rewritten code increased the number of trees that could be cut and granted amnesty for previous deforestation. President Dilma Rousseff had promised to oppose such an amnesty, and Brazil’s leading scientific organizations and many others urged her to veto the rewritten code. Nevertheless, on May 25—a year and a day since the murders of Ribeiro and Santo—Rousseff issued only a “partial veto,” which activists decry as a giant step backward: it retained amnesty for illegal deforestation if it occurred before 2008 on land holdings up to 1,000 acres. The Brazilian embassy in Washington did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Brazil is hardly the only culprit: money and power often trump sensible policy around the world. Under current rules, polluters in many countries can emit greenhouse gases for free; they are even subsidized with hundreds of billions of tax dollars. Likewise, perhaps the most powerful step toward reducing poverty would be for the United States and other wealthy nations to slash the subsidies to domestic agriculture that undercut poor farmers’ ability to compete in world markets. Northern governments sometimes rhetorically endorse such reforms—Group of 20 leaders pledged in 2009 to phase out fossil fuel subsidies—but somehow they never get around to implementing them. The UN Environmental Program has identified ninety green goals that governments have established but notes that “significant progress” has been made on only four of them. “We live in an age of irresponsibility,” says UNEP executive director Achim Steiner.

As frustrating as it is to see the solutions ignored, it is also instructive. Environmental and development advocates often act as if the problem is a lack of information: give leaders more facts and they will make better decisions. But the world doesn’t work that way. Fighting climate change and poverty requires dismantling political and economic practices that are lucrative to powerful interests and replacing them with alternatives that serve the commonweal. No politician will take such steps lightly, for the powerful retaliate. The past twenty years demonstrate that appealing mainly to the conscience of world leaders does not work. Instead one must change those leaders’ political calculations—making them as afraid of an aroused public as they are of the narrow interests behind the status quo. There are various ways to do that, from voting politicians out of office to marching in the streets. But whatever form it takes, there is no substitute for mass political action if we hope to turn this sinking ship around in time.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/168387/deja-vu-rio20

Links:

[1] http://www.vice.com/read/its-been-a-year-since-they-killed-ze-claudio-and-maria/

[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/Latin-America-Monitor/2012/0531/Brazilian-activist-flees-Amazon-home-after-threats-from-illegal-loggers/

[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/13/barack-obama-skips-rio/

[4] http://blogs.edf.org/climatetalks/2011/06/02/brazil-at-the-crossroads/

desmog uk 1/15

With the dawn on the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, fossil-fuel funded scientists would launch a full-scale attack against the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, finds the latest installment of DeSmog UK’s epic history series.]

The impending Earth Summit in Rio could spell doom for coal and oil interests. So the industry’s hired scientists started to play louder to the sceptic tune.

:{Dr:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{ **Fred Singer,**:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:then professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, led the charge as he brought together the few scientific sceptics there were to publish a book shortly beforeRio: The Greenhouse Debate Continued: An Analysis and Critique of the IPCC Climate Assessment.

His think tank, the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), also published aStatement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming attacking the Earth Summit.

The Heidelberg Appeal

Then in June, Singer launched his Heidelberg Appeal to coincide with the Summit’s opening. The appeal warned of the emergence of “an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress, and impedes economic and social development.”

It also accused the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of “pseudo-scientific arguments” and argued that “the greatest evils which stalk our Earth are ignorance and oppression, and not Science, Technology and Industry.”

Professional scientists dismissed much of Singer’s work because he was not actively researching climate science and had not published any papers in respected journals.

What Singer was doing however, was appearing regularly in the American press. He may no longer have been an active researcher who contributed to the scientific debate in the professional literature, but the daily media featured him frequently.

Intentional, Annoying Misrepresentations

Bert Bolin, IPCC founding chairman, acknowledged that Singer's book did raise some legitimate questions that were later examined by the IPCC. However, Singer also included a series of allegations that were demonstrably untrue.

Bolin recalled: “These intentional misrepresentations of the IPCC report were annoying, and almost all scientists that I have met considered Singer's activities during the early 1990's, and actually ever since, to be a systematic attempt to discredit the IPCC's efforts by making incorrect or misleading statements both verbally and in the popular press.”

Singer's friends at the George C Marshall Institute also launched a salvo against the IPCC claiming that scientific models had “substantially exaggerated its importance” of climate change.

The report blamed changes in the heat from the sun for the recent rise in global temperatures - a theory that had been ruled out by scientists publishing in the most respected journals but that would nonetheless be repeated throughout the next quarter century by sceptics.

Moral Obligation

Climate-change denier Richard Lindzen, then a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sent the report to President George Bush Senior with a covering letter using his academic credentials to lend weight to its findings.

“I thought it was important to make it clear that the science was at an early and primitive stage and that there was little basis for consensus and much reason for skepticism,” he told the *Scientific American* magazine. “I did feel a moral obligation.”

Theenergy industry also lobbied the IPCC directly. The Climate Council, the Edison Electric Institute and the National Coal Association wrote a letter to Bolin and submitted its own report.

Their complaints “all concerned procedural issues” according to Bolin. He noted: “The difference between the scientific, factual approach, on one hand, and this thinking by lawyers and industrial representatives defending special interests, on the other, was really no surprise.”

Upnext: The DeSmog UK epic history series continues with a look at the outcome of the Rio Earth Summit- where participation was more symbolic than it was effective.

@Brendanmontague