Global Climate Change: European Policy Makers' Views of How Science Enters the Political Process

Abstract

This paper examines the process of establishing scientific consensus in the global climate change debate, as reported in interviews with policy makers, administrators and advisors in four European countries. We focus on three areas: 1) the European political community's deliberate organization of scientists to advise them on global climate change science policy; 2) European rationales for taking policy action in the presence of high scientific uncertainty, and 3) European interpretations of United States policy in terms of United States culture and public opinion.

We find that consensus on global climate change is seemingly being reached - or at least publicly stated - more readily in Europe than in the United States. This appears to result from several deliberately-created European consensus building processes by representatives from the scientific community and government. In contrast, in the United States both the science of global climate change and the implications for public policy have been much more contested and debated. Extreme ends of the range of scientific opinion appear to be given more weight in the United States than in Europe, in part because of the contrasting fora available. Finally, our European interviewees attributed United States timidity on climate change remediation to American culture and voter unwillingness to forgo energy use.