Comm: "In last week's earth report we found that science has made a compelling case that human economic activity is changing the climate. Today we map out how nations - specifically the governments of the industrialised world - are responding to the threat to the entire planet.

"2001 has not been an auspicious year for international agreement. First, governments failed to emerge from the Hague climate conference with even a compromise. Next, the new US President, George W. Bush, reneged on his campaign commitment to curb CO₂ emissions. This was followed by news that, as far as the new administration is concerned, the Kyoto accord - designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 7% below a 1990 benchmark - is dead.

"In the second of our season of four earth reports on climate we tell a snakes and ladders story as we find out how difficult it is to align what science indicates must be done with what the International Community is prepared to do.

"1987, the warmest year on record. The 1980's turn out to be the warmest decade, with seven of the eight warmest years ever recorded. As a major drought sweeps across the United States the US Senate Energy Committee holds a series of congressional hearings in Washington DC. This testimony was to stun democrats and republicans alike."

James Hanson: "I said three things. Number one the world was getting warmer which I claimed could be said with 99% confidence and number two that global warming was probably due to increasing greenhouse gases and thirdly I said in our climate model, with global warming, there is an increased tendency for droughts, heavy rains and floods."

Archive sound (Hanson): "Altogether this evidence presents a very strong case, in my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now."

Comm: "This was dramatic indeed, for the first time politicians were confronted by hard evidence that the world was getting warmer. Sophisticated computer modelling showed that recent higher temperatures were part of a consistent and rising trend. The dangers of a changing climate burst onto the front pages.

"A meeting of climate scientists in Toronto subsequently called for 20% cuts in global CO₂ emissions by the year 2005.

"Within months the United Nations set up a new global body to tackle global warming, the intergovernmental panel on climate change or IPCC.

"Across the Atlantic it seemed that here too the scientific warnings about global warming were starting to be heard. Two years on the publication of the IPCC's first report had some alarming predictions, and the then British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, asked for a private briefing from the reports lead scientist.

Sir John Houghton: "21st May 1990 I had this great challenge in presenting the findings of the IPCC work to Mrs Thatcher's cabinet. I think it was rather unusual for the cabinet to actually have a scientific presentation of this kind in the cabinet room. I had about fifteen view foils and an overhead projector, they couldn't remember an overhead projector ever being used before in the cabinet room. This was a big challenge to put over in a way that would be interesting and informative for them. I was told that I would be interrupted lots of times during my presentation, in fact I spoke for twenty minutes and was not interrupted at all they listened in silence, but they did listen."

Comm: "What stunned the British cabinet into silence was the overwhelming consensus in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes first report. The most respected scientists from around the world now agreed that greenhouse gas emissions posed a serious threat."

Sir John Houghton: "The issue of climate change had, of course, been known throughout the eighties and with growing confidence we were getting, the modellers were getting more confident with their results. Our understanding of the oceans was better, ocean circulation could be folded in to the predictions, the influence of clouds could be better understood. So there was quite a lot to write about in that first report. Even more than writing about the science we were very concerned to get the presentation in a very clear, accurate and honest way and in particular we wanted to explain what we knew and what we were certain about. We were certain the climate was changing, we were certain that the earth was getting warmer because of the burning of fossil fuels and increase in carbon dioxide. We were certain that there was a problem there to be faced although we were pretty uncertain about much of the detail."

Stephen H Schneider: "I think the first scientific assessment of IPCC served, if you will, as a club. It was a club in the hands of those world leaders who had to occasionally brush off people who came along and said it's all phoney, it's not real, it's not true science, it's just a few entrepreneur scientists and IPCC said no it's not. It's hundreds of scientists who've been reviewed by hundreds more who are not asserting that they have the truth and the answer but they have a pretty good likelihood of substantial change and that was very scientifically compelling. In fact, it was politically compelling because so many scientists from so many countries were involved and they were very circumspect and careful in the way they stated it and as a result of that the bulk of world leaders accepted that there was serious science here and that led directly to the Rio conference on the environment setting up the UN Framework Commission on Climate Change working toward a Convention."

Comm: "Two years after John Houghtons cabinet presentation, preparations were made in Rio de Janeiro for the single largest meeting of heads of government the earth had ever seen. There were hopes it would herald a new international consensus in dealing with global issues."

Maurice Strong: "This is the first time we have had all the leaders of all the countries of the earth come together to take decisions that will literally set us on a pathway to a more secure earth in the future. If we don't take advantage of that opportunity its unlikely to occur again in our lifetimes and perhaps therefore it may be our last chance to change direction."

Comm: "The 180 World leaders came to Rio with action in mind. What surfaced at the meeting however was a growing split between the rich polluters of the northern hemisphere, and the poorer nations of the south who had contributed little to greenhouse gas emissions. The South argued that the cost of reducing CO₂ emissions should be met by the north, something US president George Bush, mindful of those with a vested interest in fossil fuel based businesses, was reluctant to accept."

Gordon Allardyce: "We have studied and the US government has studied some of the proposals that are being put on the table for that summit. In the case of global warming, for instance, which is one of the major issues to be considered there, one of the proposals for drastic reductions in carbon dioxide in the developed countries would affect the US for instance, over the next ten years could reduce employment by 600,000 jobs in the US."

Comm: "Employment fears also preoccupied countries of the south, who with fewer resources were less able to replace old polluting technologies."

Anil Agarwal: "I think the Southern leadership should get together, very firmly and very boldly and say we want a good management system for this earth, we want our fair share. As long as you are prepared to give us our fair share we will learn to live with it we don't want anything more than that. That fair share alone will mean that the North will have to pay a lot but that will be automatic transfer of money, with no begging bowls involved. And if then Mr Bush or Mr Kohl or Mr Major turns around and says Oh we're not prepared to do that - then you slap them in the face and say then you're not interested in saving the world's environment. Don't tell us.

Comm: "After much argument and at the 11th hour a raft of environmental promises were made, among them a long term programme of reductions in carbon emissions, although this was not yet to be legally binding."

Ute Collier: "I think Rio was extremely important for climate change. A lot of people are critical because it was a big circus and not much came out as such but historically they actually signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change which set the framework for all the further action. There were no real targets in the text just pages and pages of general recognition that climate change is an important problem. But that's what we've been working with since, and we've been coming back to it again and again basically we can now hold nations to it - the 160 who signed it who said that it was and important problem and action needed to be taken. So it was the precedent really for a legally binding protocol, which is what was signed at Kyoto eventually five years later."

Comm: "The meeting at Rio left the specifics of CO₂ reduction to five further conferences culminating in the climate summit in Kyoto

"The oil producing states of the middle east and the Global Climate Coalition, a lobby group funded by American big business viewed with alarm the concerted effort to reduce demand for fossil fuel.

"The video series, "The Greening of Planet Earth" and "The Greening continues", produced by US lobby Western Fuels Association puts the view that a carbon-saturated atmosphere won't kill the planet, it will actually help it to grow."

Professor Pat Michaels (In 'Greening of Planet Earth'): "The evidence is that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going to cause a disaster is somewhere between slim and none. However the evidence that it is doing a good thing by lengthening the growing season and making plants grow better is somewhere between large and overwhelming."

Comm: "The programmes feature a number of scientists including Professor Pat Michaels who was recommended as a leading climatologist both by the American Petroleum Institute and Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. These videos and Professor Michael's evidence before Congress have been influential in forming US policy on global warming."

Ute Collier: "Actually big business was undoubtedly a very destructive force. They got together under a coalition called the Global Climate Coalition and that included big multinational companies all the oil companies like BP, Shell, Exxon, car manufacturers like Ford, mining companies, coal companies...and they put in millions of dollars in advertising, in lobbying US Congress and Senate and basically getting a lot of buy-in, especially from the Republicans in the US."

Comm: "Industry had already experienced what a strong global accord could achieve. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey had been first to show a link between the depletion of the ozone layer, which protects the earth from harmful ultra violet rays and CFC's. In 1986 the Montreal Protocol led to over 160 nations signing up to phasing out CFC's and other ozone destroying chemicals. This would effectively banall CFC's, shutting down CFC and other ozone damaging chemical production."

Chisholm: "I think the Montreal Protocol was a fine environmental effort. It was one of the first international environmental legislative attempts. There were relatively few countries who initially signed onto the Protocol but within about 18 months there were over 130 countries that had signed the Protocol. It became a fairly sweeping force."

Kalus Toepfer: "There was a remarkable progress proving that it is possible in an integrated, coordinated way to act in environment topics worldwide. So, when we started in the mid-eighties there was an overall protection of more than a million tons of CFC s now we are down to something about 160,000 and if you are only going to the industrialised countries these are only 15,000 of what we call essential users."

Duncan Brack: "One of the main lessons of the Montreal Protocol is the way environmental treaties evolve. When that treaty was negotiated it only sought 50% cuts in CFC production and consumption by the end of the century. Now that has been revised five times since then, every time it has got tougher CFC's were phased out in the industrialised world six years ago and it has proved much easier to achieve it's targets than anyone thought possible."

Joe Farman: "Now thank goodness, with any luck, we should be back to something like an atmosphere people knew before by 2017. But that's the horror of the situation an industry in fifteen years, just over fifteen years, exponential growth putting the wrong things in the atmosphere - you can end up with a problem which can take a hundred years to put right."

Comm: "In Madrid in 1995 the IPCC released its second report. It confirmed the IPCC findings of two years earlier, pointing to an increasing human influence on climate change."

Ben Santer: "In the first assessment report in 1990 scientists had felt that we did not know enough in order to definitively say that human activity had contributed to climate change. On the 29th November 1995 we made a different statement - that after full examination of the scientific evidence we felt that a majority of that evidence pointed towards a human affect on climate. That is what was historic about Madrid."

Comm: "The Euphoria was short lived, parts of the press accused Santer of distortion."

Sir John Houghton: "Ben Santer was accused of altering the chapter without authority, quite wrongly, quite falsely. But the lobby groups, particularly in the US, the Global Climate Coalition really went for him and said he'd broken the rules."

Ben Santer: "What was so disturbing about the criticism that surfaced after Madrid was that it focused on the integrity of individual scientists, it did not focus on the science at all. There were things that were said that were clearly untrue and you would point these things out to people and they would continue to say them. That is a difficult realisation, I think, for a scientist, that there are people out there who are not accessible to reason, who are not truly interested in better understanding the science."

Comm: "Now the industry funded Global Climate Coalition went into overdrive. Attacking the IPCC and launching their own TV ads."

Archive TV Ads: "Our president must decide whether he'll sign a UN climate treaty that could increase the cost of gasoline by 50 cents a gallon. I worked hard to build my business but now a UN climate treaty could put me out of business by raising the cost of gas natural gas and gasoline by 25 to 50%..."

Comm: "The ads played on public concern about a carbon tax, industry wanted to make sure that American politicians saw that as political suicide. But by the time the worlds leaders met in Kyoto 2 years later reductions in carbon emissions were firmly on the agenda."

Archive TV Ads: "...but a treaty like this isn't global and it won't work."

Comm: "The deal hammered out over two weeks was a complex agreement designed to reduce industrialised countries' carbon levels to an average 5% of 1990 levels by 2010.

"In order to make these targets more easily attainable, the conference agreed a series of flexibility mechanisms where the right to pollute could be traded on the open market as pollution credits. This would enable a richer country to pollute above their agreed pollution targets. These credits could be bought in one of three basic ways.

"1. By buying another industrialised country's pollution entitlement, known as carbon credits.

"2. By donation of clean pollution free technology, otherwise known as `joint implementation in the case of industrialised countries and the Clean Development Mechanism for developed countries'.

"3. By soaking up carbon dioxide by the planting or maintaining of its forests, otherwise known as `carbon sinks' (this can be `at home', doesn't have to be in another country). Some saw these mechanisms as loopholes in the agreement."

Rafe Pomerance, US Department of State: "If properly utilised, emissions trading and joint implementation can actually protect the global climate system far faster than any other system that any other country has proposed. The ideas that we have would allow us to use global capital most efficiently. So for a given amount of money, we get far more reductions than we would otherwise. So quite the opposite of loopholes, it is actually a way to ultimately protect the environment much quicker."

Comm: "Some feel this exchange - known as hot air trading - would mean the rich countries could buy their way out of trouble, and is serious loophole in the Kyoto agreement."

Athena Balestros: "We would basically categorise super heated air as the biggest climate fraud of the century. This is a very dangerous loophole in the convention and the developing countries are very very concerned because to me this convention is about saving climate, saving peoples lives and saving the environment. People here are talking about hot air and basically allowing a lot of these loopholes to enter into this agreement."

Kirstie Hamilton: "There's nothing wrong in principal with trading with emissions. What counts is whether there is a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. That's what we need to save the climate. At the moment governments are talking about these kind of instruments as a way of fudging the issue, as a way of dodging taking real responsibility."

Comm: "The second Kyoto mechanism is known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). It's the transfer of energy efficient technology from the OECD group of industrialised nations to the less developed countries. The CDM would allow a country to support an energy saving project elsewhere, and then claim the emissions saved as its own. Far from transferring clean technology, some feel this could be used to dump obsolete technology from the north."

Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute: "Whenever we retire obsolete, inefficient equipment of the north, guess what we do - we flog it off to the south. And that's an anti-development measure. We ought to take that inefficient equipment out back and shoot it - we ought to scrap it. It's worth much more to the world dead than alive."

Comm: "The third mechanism concerns sinks. that's shorthand for the forests that remove some of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If a country can prove that it is conserving or planting trees then this would be set against its emission levels. But CO₂ absorption by forests acting as `sinks' is difficult to quantify. Different forests behave differently."

Sarwono Kusumaatmadja: "Well I think old growth forests have a limited role as sinks because they are mature trees. Sinks can be designed as part of a forestation and reforestation and there is great scope for those kind of activities in countries like Indonesia. The question is how to link it in a fair minded fashion with emissions reduction."

Comm: "The 38 countries which are the major emitters of greenhouse gases came away from Kyoto with a compromise agreement. But whether the agreement is full of loopholes, or a vital first step, is open for debate.

"Good agreement or bad, all that was supposed to be left to do was agreeing the details of how to implement the Kyoto agreement. But what was started in Rio almost ten years before, foundered in the Hague.

"At the heart of the dispute were carbon sinks, or forests and the now notorious clause 3.4, drafted sloppily by tired delegates in the final hours at Kyoto. Delegates from the US argued that this clause entitled countries to claim carbon credits for their existing forests. This meant the US could reduce carbon emissions by doing nothing other than continuing to protect existing old forest growth."

Ian Willmore, Friends of the Earth: "Essentially the US position is that they want to avoid any domestic action to cut emissions from fossil fuels, and that means that they want to do things like counting the forests they've already got against their Kyoto targets on the grounds that they sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That's a ludicrous, preposterous proposal and it would simply undermine any point to the original Kyoto Agreement."

Comm: "The second major sticking point involved carbon trading. The European Union had argued that countries should meet their targets primarily by activities taking place within their own borders. The US wanted to be allowed to follow the cheapest options, investing in clean-up technology in Eastern Europe, wind power in India, or solar power in Africa. The EU wanted a ceiling of 50% on these foreign activities, the US refused any limit."

John Gummer: "They want a system which avoids their having to do anything and yet they are the biggest polluters in the world. 4% of the world's population 25% of the world's pollution so they've got to come on board, if they are not going to change our climate. I mean it's the biggest invasion of sovereignty one can think of - America changing the climate of the world."

Comm: "Failure at the Hague and the decision by the new US administration to dump Kyoto for the present does not mean the climate agreement is dead just yet. Formally the conference was suspended and and will resume in Bonn, Germany in July 2001. In the meantime the European Union is leading frantic behind and front of the scenes diplomacy to keep it alive. There is even talk that it would be still be worthwile to go ahead even without the USA - the world's biggest polluter.

Kjell Larsson, Environment Minister, Sweden, EU Negotiator: "Protocol without the United States is of course better than no protocol at all, and as I see it there is no real alternative - there's no alternative at all to the Kyoto protocol and time is pressing."

Comm: "Ironically the big loser could be American business itself."

Phil Clapp: "The threat that there actually might be an emissions trading system and a protocol in effect by 2002 in which the US might not be a part is going to, I think, make a number of business people in the US think again. Because what that means is you're going to have billions of dollars in benefits to companies in other nations who actually start becoming more energy efficient and all of a sudden they are not going to be part of this new more efficient energy economy."

Comm: "That's politics. The scientific reality however is that even a fully ratified Kyoto protocol delivering an average of 5% carbon emissions will barely scratch the surface of the reductions needed, buying us at best a ten year delay in global warming trends. At least 60% reductions are needed to stabilise carbon levels in the climate."

Duncan Brack: "The Kyoto Protocol is obviously a very tentative first step - average 5% reduction on 1990 levels. It is still obviously not anywhere near enough to the final reduction we need to get but it's a start and once you get these treaties working, they evolve, they develop tougher targets, they respond to circumstances. They get the power of industry and science working in their direction and things become possible that you didn't know were possible to start with. So it's really important to get the process started and that's why I think the Kyoto Protocol, it may have lots of flaws which pressure groups do point out, but it's still better than not having a Kyoto Protocol."

Jan Pronk: "This system now has failed in many respects it has also produced some results. In the field of development, sometimes in the field of peace, sometimes in the field of environment. And all countries should understand that if this system is not producing results the system itself is at stake."

Comm: "Next week in this season of climate films Earth report leaves the world of politics. We travel from Alaska to the highlands to Ethiopia to document the impact climate change is already having."