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Politicians and scientists are at loggerheads over the Climate Change Convention, the most important outcome of the Earth Summit at Rio in 1992. The head negotiator for implementing the convention, aimed at combating the greenhouse effect, last week accused scientists of ‘suffering from a Dr Frankenstein syndrome’.

The work of scientists created the convention. But ‘now the convention is alive and walking, and deciding things, the scientists have reacted against its demands’, claimed Raul Estrada-Oyuela, the Argentinian chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, at a meeting in London last week.

In August, the negotiating committee hopes to make key decisions about how to implement the convention, including what targets countries should aim for in reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases after the year 2000. This requires scientific advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which, says Estrada-Oyuela, the panel is withholding.

It was the IPCC’s pioneering report in 1990 which convinced governments that global warming was a real threat. But Estrada-Oyuela claims that the scientists who are meant to provide the advice he and his colleagues need have postponed a meeting to discuss their new research findings until October – after the critical political meeting. The scientists’ meeting was originally scheduled for April. ‘They say that they have their own programme. But this is not helping our work,’ he said.

The IPCC had originally intended to publish a new report this year, updating its findings. But an extensive process of peer review has delayed the work.

John Houghton, chairman of the IPCC’s scientific working group, insists that such rigorous peer review is needed to preserve the scientific unanimity that is essential to the IPCC’s work. He says that some interim findings will appear this autumn, but the full report is not now due until 1995.

According to Houghton, the report will contain little that is new. ‘The past four years’ work has underlined and confirmed most of what we said in 1990,’ he says. The prediction that a doubling of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere within a century would raise global average temperatures by 2.5 °C is ‘very likely to be the same’ in the report.

However, this delay may provide some governments with an excuse to drag their feet. Crucial decisions on the convention were due to be taken this summer, before the first full meeting of the convention’s signatories in Berlin next March.

The ambiguous wording of the text, much of it required to persuade the then US president George Bush to sign, has led to disputes over what nations are expected to do under the treaty. At the meeting last week, Bob Reinstein, Bush’s chief negotiator to the convention, claimed that it included ‘no legal requirement’ to return emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2000, only that countries report on progress towards such a goal.

Other disputes surround a plan by President Bill Clinton to offset the US’s emissions of carbon dioxide by planting trees to absorb the extra gas, and a proposal for ‘joint implementation’ under which rich nations might continue to increase emissions while investing in cleanup technologies in countries such as Russia and India.