The United Nations set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the request of member nations in 1988. The panel’s mandate was to provide the world “with an objective, scientific view of climate change and its political and economic impacts”. The IPCC achieved this by assessing published literature. In 1990, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher added her thoughts to the debate at the opening of a new climate prediction and change center.
How Margaret Thatcher’s Speech Was So Important for the World
The British Prime Minister was the first global leader to mention climate change specifically. She was a chemist by profession. We should have listened more attentively when she said, “We are seeing a vast increase in the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere…The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto.”
Margaret Thatcher’s blend of economic vision and common sense was only matched by one other contemporary leader, Ronald Reagan. Hear what she had to say the following year at her political party conference. Her final two sentences ring down the ages with a message about the greenhouse effect largely airbrushed out by commerce and industry at the time.
The Major Highlights from Thatcher’s 1990 Address
“Of course, there is a lot more that we still need to find out but if the [Panel on Climate Change’s] predictions are broadly right,” Thatcher said, “then the world could become hotter than at any time in the last 100,000 years. There is a lot more that we still need to find out but if the panel’s predictions are broadly right, then we would be taking a great risk with future generations if, having received this early warning, we did nothing about it or just took the attitude: “Well! It will see me out.”
But the band played on, as they say while the east and the west scored political points. Margaret Thatcher pleaded for “a realistic international program of action and an equally realistic time table”. How much longer must we wait for global consensus, and concerted action among nations truly united in the cause?
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Climate Change Part 14: 1972 UN Conference
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