Saved by disaster? Abrupt climate change, political inertia, and the possibility of an intergenerational arms race

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 140-162

  Gardiner, Stephen M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 80052888085     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2009.01444.x     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. quoted in David Adam, Peter Walker, and Alison Benjamin, "Grim Outlook for Poor Countries in Climate Report", Manchester Guardian, September 18, 2007.
2. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The 2007 Report is equivocal. For example, Working Group I tried to avoid the topic of rapid ice sheet collapse, and was criticized by some scientists for doing so, while Working Group II asserted that the chances of such collapse were considerable.
3. (See IPCC, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis; IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007];
4. Cornelia Dean, "Even Before Its Release, World Climate Report Is Criticized as Too Optimistic", New York Times, February 2, 2007;
5. David Adam, "Scientists Warn It May Be too Late to Save the Ice Caps", Manchester Guardian, February 19, 2007.) The Synthesis Report charted an intermediate course, saying that it projected linear sea level rise, but more rapid change "cannot be excluded." More generally, it stated: "Anthropogenic warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible", and mentioned high levels of species extinction as an example.
6. (IPCC, Climate Change 2007: The Synthesis Report [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 13.)
7. For a more recent assessment, see Timothy Lenton, Hermann Held, Elmar Kriegler, Jim Hall, Wolfgang Lucht, Stefan Rahmsdorf, and Hans Joachim Schnellnhuber, "Tipping Points in the Earth's Climate System", Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences 105, no. 6(2008):1786-93.
8. US National Research Council, Committee on Abrupt Climate Change, Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2002).
9. Robert Gagosian, "Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?", Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (2003), 12.
10. IPCC, Climate Change 1990: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
11. cf. Donald Brown, American Heat: Ethical Problems with the United States' Response to Global Warming (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 18-19.
12. John Houghton, Climate Change: The Complete Briefing, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 184.
13. see US National Research Council, Abrupt Climate Change, 1. The Council offers the following scientific definition of an abrupt change: "Technically, an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause." But, recognizing that what is important from the point of view of policy is the societal and ecological impacts, it also suggests that an abrupt change is "one that takes place so rapidly and unexpectedly that human or natural systems have difficulty adapting to it"
14. James Hansen, "A Slippery Slope: How Much Global Warming Constitutes 'Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference'?" Climatic Change 68(2005):269-79, at 269.
15. Michael Oppenheimer and Richard Alley, "The West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Long-Term Climate Policy", Climatic Change 64(2004):1-10;
16. United Nations Environment Program, Global Environment Outlook 4(2008), 64 (available at http://www.unep.org/geo/).
17. Hansen, "A Slippery Slope", 274.
18. James Hansen, "Defusing the Global Warming Time Bomb", Scientific American 290(2004):68-77, at 73.
19. Hansen, "Defusing", 73.
20. Quirin Schiermeier, "A Sea Change", Nature 439(January 19, 2006):256-60, at 258;
21. James Hansen, "Can We Still Avoid Dangerous Human-Made Climate Change?" Talk presented at the New School University, 2006.
22. Gagosian, "Abrupt Climate Change";
23. Richard Alley, "Abrupt Climate Change", Scientific American 291, no. 5(2004):62-69, at 68;
24. R. J. Stouffer et al., "Investigating the Causes of the Response of the Thermohaline Circulation to Past and Future Climate Changes", Journal of Climate 19(2006):1365-87;
25. Michael Vellinga and Richard A. Wood, "Global Impacts of a Collapse of the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation", Climatic Change 51(2002):251-67.
26. See, for example, Harry L. Bryden, Hannah R. Longworth, and Stuart A. Cunningham, "Slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation at 25 Degrees North", Nature 438(December 1, 2005):655-57.
27. (Schiermeier, "A Sea Change", 257);
28. Brian Barry, Why Social Justice Matters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 260.
29. Robert Berner, "Examination of Hypotheses for the Permo-Triassic Boundary Extinction by Carbon Cycle Modeling", Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences 99, no. 7(2002):4172-77;
30. Barry, Why Social Justice Matters, 260.
31. Nicholas Kristof, "The Big Burp Theory of the Apocalypse", New York Times, April 16, 2006.
32. Alley, "Abrupt Climate Change", 69. Consider, for example, the recent emergence of ocean acidification as a serious concern.
33. IPCC, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
34. see Michael Oppenheimer and Annie Petsonk, "Article 2 of the UNFCCC: Historical Origins, Recent Interpretations", Climatic Change 73(2004):195-226.
35. More recent work by Lenton et al., "Tipping Points", gives similar estimates: 1-2°C for Greenland, 3-5°C for the West Antarctic, and 3-5°C for the thermohaline. They identify loss of Artic summer sea ice as the most imminent threat, at 0.5-2°C with a transition timescale of approximately ten years.
36. IPCC, Climate Change 1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
37. cited by Houghton, Climate Change, 105.
38. IPCC, Climate Change 2007: The Scientific Basis, 8.
39. Naomi Oreskes, "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change", Science, December 3, 2005, 1686.
40. 2 Emissions from Fossil-Fuel Burning, Cement Manufacture, and Gas Flaring: 1751-2005" (2008). Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, United States Department of Energy. Available at: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/ emis/glo.htm.
41. Hansen, "Can We Still Avoid?";
42. Frances Moore, "Carbon Dioxide Emissions Accelerating Rapidly", Earth Policy Institute (2008), available at: http://www.earth-policy.org/ Indicators/CO2/2008.htm;
43. and James Hansen and Makiko Sato, "Greenhouse Gas Growth Rates", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 46(2004):16109-14.
44. European Environment Agency, The European Environment: State and Outlooks 2005 (available at http://www.europa.eu/publications/state-of-environment- report-2005-1);
45. Roger Harrabin, "UK Seeking CO2 Trading Increase", BBC, September 18, 2008;
46. Stephen Gardiner, "The Global Warming Tragedy and the Dangerous Illusion of the Kyoto Protocol", Ethics and International Affairs 18, no. 1(2004):23-39.
47. (see Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001];
48. Climatic Change 77: Special Issue on Climate Change and the Psychology of Long-Term Risk [2006];
49. and Gardiner, "The Global Warming Tragedy.").
50. see Brown, American Heat;
51. Gardiner, "Ethics and Global Climate Change";
52. and Elizabeth Desombre, "Global Warming: More Common than Tragic", Ethics and International Affairs 18, no. 1(2004):41-46.
53. Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, 318.
54. Clive L. Spash, Greenhouse Economics: Value and Ethics (London: Routledge, 2002), 178.
55. John Broome, Counting the Cost of Global Warming (Isle of Harris, UK: White Horse Press, 2002), 19.
56. Tyler Cowen and Derek Parfit, "Against the Social Discount Rate", in Justice Between Age Groups and Generations, ed. Peter Laslett and James Fishkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 144-61;
57. Martin Weitzman, "Why the Far Distant Future Should Be Discounted at Its Lowest Possible Rate", Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 36(1998):201-8;
58. Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
59. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security" (2003), 14. Available at: http://www.grist.org/pdf/AbruptClimateChange2003.
60. Elke Weber, "Experience-Based and Description-Based Perceptions of Long-Term Risk: Why Global Warming Does Not Scare Us(Yet)", Climatic Change 77(2006):103-20, at 103.
61. See also Anthony Leiserowitz, "American Risk Perceptions: Is Climate Change Dangerous?" Risk Analysis 25, no. 6(2005):1433-42, at 1438 and 1440;
62. and "Before and After the Day After Tomorrow", Environment 46, no. 6(2004):23-37, at 27. Broader psychological, institutional, and political explanations are canvassed in Oppenheimer 2006 in the papers by Baron, Bazerman, Leiserowitz, and Sunstein. I focus on Weber's account because it has the most direct relevance to the distinction between the abrupt and gradual paradigms.
63. Weber, "Experience-Based", 104.
64. See references in Dale Jamieson, "An American Paradox", Climatic Change 77(2006):97-102, at 101-2, n. 1.
65. See Gill Ereaut and Nat. Segnit, Warm Words: How Are We Telling the Climate Story and How Can We Tell It Better? (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2006), 7.
66. The next two paragraphs are adapted from Stephen Gardiner, "The Pure Intergenerational Problem", The Monist 86, no. 3(2003):481-500.
67. Gardiner, "The Pure Intergenerational Problem." Note that the PIBP does not assume that there ought to be no consumption of temporally diffuse goods. Moreover, any application of the PIBP will need to be understood against the background of some theory of what would constitute legitimate consumption of such goods. However, this is not to say that the existenceof the PIBPis contingent on some particular theoryof legitimate intergenerational consumption. Instead, the PIBParises for any such theory that does not assume that the then-current generation may do completely as it pleases. Hence, the PIBP assumes only that there is a genuine question about legitimate intergenerational consumption, and that the right answer is not that one.
68. See Gardiner, "The Global Warming Tragedy." Obviously, the application of the PIBP to the real world is complicated by several factors, and especially the existence of generational overlap. But I do not think this undermines such an application in this case. For some general reasons for skepticism about overlap
69. Tony Blair, Climate Change Speech (2004). Available at: http://www.number-10.gov. uk/output/page6333.asp.
70. David Archer, "Fate of Fossil Fuel CO2 in Geologic Time", Journal of Geophysical Research 110(2005):5.
71. See Stephen Gardiner, "A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption", Environmental Values 15(2006):397-413.
72. David Archer and Bruce Buffett, "Time-Dependent Response of the Global Ocean Clathrate Reservoir to Climatic and Anthropogenic Forcing", Geochemistry. Geophysics. Geosystems 6(2005), Q03002, doi:10.1029/2004GC000854;
73. Danny Harvey and Zhen Huang, "Evaluation of the Potential Impact of Methane Clathrate Destabilization on Future Global Warming", Journal of Geophysical Research 100(1995):2905-2926.
74. US National Research Council, Abrupt.
75. See California Assembly Bill 32(2006), section 38599.
76. Martino Traxler, "Fair Chore Division for Climate Change", Social Theory and Practice 28(2002):101-34, at 107.
77. See also Stephen Gardiner, "Is Arming the Future with Geoengineering Really the Lesser Evil?" in Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue, eds., Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
78. See Gardiner, "A Perfect Moral Storm."
79. Oppenheimer and Petsonk, "Article 2 of the UNFCCC."
80. Sivan Kartha, Tom Athanasiou, Paul Baer, and Deborah Cornland, "Cutting the Knot: Climate Protection, Political Realism and Equity as Requirements of a Post-Kyoto Regime", 4. Emphasis in original. Available at http://www.ecoequity.org.
81. Weber, "Experienced-Based", 116.
82. see Stephen Gardiner, "Environmentalism: An Update", in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 589-92.
83. See Leiserowitz, "American Risk Perceptions", 1437-38.
84. See Gardiner, "Pure Intergenerational Problem";
85. and Stephen Gardiner, "A Contract on Future Generations?" in Intergenerational Justice, ed. Axel Gosseries and Lukas Meyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 77-119.