GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE

Global climate change refers to the ways in which average planetary weather patterns alter over time. The term global warming, though common, is a misnomer, for under some scenarios it is possible that part of the earth could cool, even as most of the planet gets warmer. The global climate change debate offers a superb case study of the relations existing in the early twenty-first century among science, technology, politics, and questions of meaning and value.

Defining the Problem

Because of the long timescales involved, climate change is difficult to experience directly; knowledge of meteorological variation generally falls under the classification of "weather." Science and technology—in forms such as the uncovering of the basic physical principles of atmospheric science, geologic evidence such as glacial moraines and plant remains, and determinations of ancient atmospheric concentrations derived from ice cores taken from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets—is needed to identify even the possibility of climate change. This fact has encouraged the assumption that both the definition of and the human response to possible climate change should be fundamentally scientific and technological in nature.

Geologists have known since the mid-nineteenth century that local, regional, and global climate undergoes change through time. Indeed, adding the term change to climate is nearly a redundancy, because climate varies on all timescales from decades to millions of years. This makes it difficult to clearly distinguish between the concepts of weather (transient variations) and climate (the long term status of the system).

For instance, the earth experienced an ice age that peaked 18,000 years ago; but considering the larger span of the earth's history, it is still in an ice age. While the norm for humanity, geologic evidence suggests that the earth has had ice on its poles for only a very small fraction of its history.

It was the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927) who in 1896 first suggested the possibility of human-induced climate change through the burning of fossil fuels. Climate change came to general notice in the 1970s, when concern was voiced about the possibility of global cooling leading to a new ice age. This remains a live possibility: Evidence of ancient climates shows that in the last 800,000 years the planet has seen a series of oscillations between ice ages, of approximately 100,000 years in duration, and interglacials, of around 10,000 years in length. Earth is thus overdue for a cold spell.

The 1980s saw the rise of concern about the "greenhouse effect" caused by increasing levels of human-produced carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. Concern exploded in the summer of 1988, which saw record warmth throughout the United States. This warming trend appears to be continuing: Nine of the ten hottest years since the beginning of record keeping in 1880 have occurred between 1990 and 2003.

Ethical, Political, and Philosophical Issues

What defines climate change as a "problem" at all? This question relates to a long-standing debate within environmental ethics on whether nature has only instrumental value for human beings or has intrinsic value outside of any considerations of its value to humans. The first (anthropocentrist) position claims that concern about the environment should be motivated by an interest in human welfare. The second (ecocentrist) position believes that animals, species, ecosystems, and even rock formations and climate patterns can have qualities that make them the objects of moral concern.

On the first view, climate change is a problem only from the perspective of human wants, needs, and obligations to one another. Rising sea level is a physical event; it is only when it floods New Orleans or the Maldives that it becomes a problem. From this point of view, climate change has become a crisis in two senses in the early 2000s. First, human populations, structures, or the ecosystems societies depend upon may be exposed to climate-induced dangers such as rising sea level, changes in temperature and/or precipitation, changes in the frequency of extreme events such as hurricanes, and changes in vegetation and the growing season. Second, if climate change is partially or wholly human-caused—that is, if it is anthropogenic in nature—then the persons, industries, or societies that have caused these problems may fairly be held accountable.

This latter question has spawned a global debate about the respective responsibilities of developed and developing nations to address climate change. The debate turns on the fact that most of the increase of greenhouse gases to date has been caused by industrial nations, especially the United States, whereas most of the future contribution of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is likely to come from developing countries such as China. Should developed countries be required to address questions of greenhouse gas emissions first, because they caused the problem, allowing developing nations to pollute more as they develop their industries? Or is such an approach self-negating, in that any real solution to greenhouse gas emissions requires a common global effort?

On another view, however, climate change is a more than a human affair. Climate change is certainly an issue for any species driven to extinction by ecosystem change. It is here that the question of global climate change touches upon core questions within the philosophy of nature. Species come into and go out of existence constantly; does it matter whether a species' extinction is caused by natural climate variability or anthropogenic change? In the mind of some, the difference is crucial: Change (including extinction) that is natural in origin should be tolerated and adapted to, whereas human-caused change or extinction should be addressed and mitigated. Making the question even more vexed are claims that there is no "natural" left in the early twenty-first century. On this view the entire earth, including its atmosphere, has become an artifact through centuries of inhabitation, cultivation, and pollution (Allenby 1999, McKibben 1999). These aspects of the climate change debate point toward religious and metaphysical considerations concerning the status of nature rather than to more and better data and predictions. In ways similar to the current debate concerning genetic engineering, questions are increasingly being asked about whether nature represents a limit that should be acknowledged and in some sense obeyed.

The Scientific Effort

Concerns about global climate change have led to a massive, unprecedented, and worldwide scientific, technological, and political effort to understand the causes and consequences of climate change. The basic assumption underlying all of these efforts is that climate change science is necessary for the devising of climate change policy.

The United States leads the world in climate change research, funding more than half of all the work. Approximately half of the nearly $2 billion annual budget for the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP, The U.S. Government's Interagency Research Program On Climate Change) is devoted to satellites and other data systems. The rest supports research across a wide range of sciences such as physics, atmospheric chemistry, oceanography, and ecology. A significant part of this research is conducted through computer simulations, the best known of which are global climate models (GCMs) that run on the world's fastest computers. Products of a truly global scientific and technological effort, GCMs have produced sets of predictions concerning the possible state of the atmosphere in 2100. (There is, of course, nothing magical about the year 2100; it was picked for symmetry and because this period was thought to be within the moral horizon of most people. In fact, computer models predict that change will accelerate after this date.)

Research into the social and political aspects of climate change—broadly known as "human contributions and responses to global change"—receives around 2 percent of the USGCRP budget, or $50 million. Even then, the overwhelming majority of this investment goes toward quantitative (often economic) social science research. While questions of ethics and values have often been voiced in public debate, research into such questions has been pursued only at the margins. The overall definition of the problem of climate change thus remains deeply immersed in science: The USGCRP seeks to identify the basic facts of the matter, leaving questions of value and justice to the political realm. More to the point, the assumptions remain quite positivistic: It is assumed that ethical and political solutions will somehow be derived from advances in climate science.

After two decades of concerted research, the community of climate change scientists have reached a high degree of consensus on several basic points: The global climate is warming; this warming is largely anthropogenic in origin; and the consequences of this warming could be quite severe. In the words of the National Research Council's Committee on the Science of Climate Change, "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities … Temperatures are, in fact, rising" (NRC 2001, p. 1).

Science Meets Policy

Climate science research in the United States and other nations (principally the European Union and Japan) feeds into a global political effort to manage the problem of global climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lies at the center of these efforts. The World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme founded the IPCC in 1988 "to assess scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change" (IPCC). The IPCC consists of:

• Working Group I, which assesses the scientific aspects of the climate system and climate change
• Working Group II, which focuses on the vulnerability of socioeconomic and natural systems to climate change, the consequences (both negative and positive) of climate change, and possible options for adapting to climate change
• Working Group III, which evaluates options for restricting greenhouse gas emissions and other ways to mitigate climate change
• The Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, which runs the IPCC National Greenhouse Gas Inventories Programme

In addition, a series of special reports supports the working groups, the most important being the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), which provides baseline sociological, political, and economic parameters for GCMs. Since 1990 the working groups have issued a series of joint assessment reports on a five- to six-year basis. These reports represent a remarkable synthesis of technoscientific research. Each assessment directly involves hundreds of scientists who collectively spend thousands of hours collating and synthesizing the available information on the above topics in a thick set of volumes. After a series of reviews, each volume is then boiled down to a "summary for policymakers" that attempts to extract insights most relevant to decision makers worldwide.

These IPCC reports are created to support the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which seeks to devise a global political strategy. In late 1997 the UNFCCC gathered representatives from more than 160 nations in Kyoto, Japan, to negotiate binding limitations on greenhouse gases for developed nations. The resulting Kyoto Protocol called for developed nations to agree to limit their greenhouse gas emissions as compared with the levels emitted in 1990. The bulk of the political efforts to address the challenges of climate change have centered on negotiating the particular provisions of the Kyoto Protocol.

The results, however, have not been encouraging. Even if the Kyoto Protocol were to be ratified—and the Bush Administration announced its rejection of the protocol in 2001—the proposed limitations to greenhouse emissions would not come anywhere near the estimated 50 to 75 percent reduction scientists believe is necessary to stabilize atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. What is more, the $25 to $30 billion the United States spent on climate change research from the early 1980s to the early 2000s highlights the questionable structure of the existing global climate change debate. Across this twenty-year period, the range of uncertainty for the predicted amount of change in global mean temperatures by 2100 actually increased, from 1.4 to 5.4 degrees Celsius in 1980 to 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius in 2001. This increase in the range of possible warming has provided cover for politicians to call for more research instead of devising plans of action.

Future of the Problem

The paradox is that at the same time that a scientific consensus has formed on the reality of climate change, the actual range of future outcomes has increased rather than shrunk. A number of factors contribute to this increase of uncertainty, including a greater appreciation of the complexity and attendant lack of understanding concerning some parts of the climate system (for instance, the behavior of clouds, and the ocean–atmosphere interface), the difficulties in matching differing types of data, and the possibility that a system as complex as world climate is fundamentally unpredictable in nature. But the core difficulty lies elsewhere: The computer simulations used to model the atmosphere for the year 2100 are themselves fundamentally dependent on future sociological and economic indicators that are essentially unknowable. This is the significance of the SRES scenarios, which provide the basic inputs and parameters for the GCMs.

The SRES scenarios consist of six different imagined future patterns of energy use, technological progress, and social, political, and economic development. These six possible development paths explore future choices concerning population, lifestyle, the degree of globalization and economic integration, the development of non-carbon-based energy sources, and the possibility of carbon sequestration—choices that are not predictable in ways analogous to physical systems. Moreover, the point is not just that future social conditions cannot be predicted, but that they are in large part a function of human choices. The future does not simply befall humanity; individually and collectively humans exercise a significant influence over what happens. Rather than treating the future as if it were beyond human control, the challenge of global climate change calls for public debate about desirable futures.

It is thus arguable that while scientific research on climate change has greatly increased the knowledge and appreciation of the problem, the focus of attention should now shift toward two other areas that complement climate science: better understanding the nature of the social, ethical, political, and political dimensions of the problem, and devising ways to increase the resilience of both natural and social systems to a global climate that is already undergoing alteration. This approach would involve a shift in attention away from precisely modeling the climate system and toward devising a "no-regrets" strategy tied to sustainable development, social justice, and the modification of desires. The problem, however, is that such a "soft" approach to global climate change runs up against 300 years of tradition in which humankind has attempted to engineer its way out of problems rather than developing personal and political means for modifying its behavior.

ROBERT FRODEMAN

SEE ALSO Automobiles;Deforestation and Desertification;Environmental Ethics;International Relations;Oil;Pollution;Rain Forest;United Nations Environmental Program.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allenby, Brad. (1999). "Earth Systems Engineering: The Role of Industrial Ecology in an Engineered World." Journal of Industrial Ecology 2(3): 73–93. Argues that climate change should be treated as an engineering problem.

Brunner, Ronald. (2001). "Science and the Climate Change Regime." Policy Sciences 34(1): 1–33. Excellent introduction to policy dimensions of the climate debate.

Drake, Frances. (2000). Global Warming: The Science of Climate Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

McKibben, Bill. (1999). The End of Nature, 2nd edition. New York: Anchor. Well-known and accessible account of cultural dimensions of human impact upon nature.

Miller, Clark A., and Paul N. Edwards, eds. (2001). Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. A rich collection of essays treating different aspects of the climate problem.

National Research Council (NRC). Committee on the Science of Climate Change. (2001). Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. An important recent report summarizing the state of scientific knowledge.

Rayner, Steve, and Elizabeth L. Malone, eds. (1998). Human Choice and Climate Change. 4 vols. Columbus, OH: Battelle Press. A rich variety of essays on social science perspectives on climate change.

Sarewitz, Daniel, and Roger A. Pielke Jr. (2000). "Breaking the Global-Warming Gridlock." Atlantic Monthly 286(1): 54–64. An accessible and innovative treatment of policy questions concerning climate change.

Shackley, Simon; Peter Young; Stuart Parkinson; and Brian Wynne. (1998). "Uncertainty, Complexity, and Concepts of Good Science in Climate Change Modeling: Are GCMs the Best Tools?" Climatic Change 38(2): 159–205. A good review of the use of global climate models.

U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research. (2002). Our Changing Planet: The Fiscal Year 2003 U.S. Global Change Research Program and Climate Change Research Initiative, A Supplement to the President's Fiscal Year 2003 Budget. Washington, DC: Author. Federal publication that annually summarizes the state of current research.

U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research. (2003). Strategic Plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. Washington, DC: Author. Another useful governmental report.

Weart, Spencer R. (2003). The Discovery of Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

INTERNET RESOURCES

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Available from http://www.ipcc.ch.

National Research Council (NRC). Committee on the Science of Climate Change. (2001). Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions. Available from http://books.nap.edu/books/0309075742/html/.

U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research. (2002). Our Changing Planet: The Fiscal Year 2003 U.S. Global Change Research Program and Climate Change Research Initiative, A Supplement to the President's Fiscal Year 2003 Budget. Available from http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/ocp2003.pdf.

U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research. (2003). Strategic Plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. Available from http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/stratplan2003/final/.