Clash of the Titans: The Politics and Science

REAL INSTITUTO ELCANO, 2009

Climatic Change, 2008

Revue juridique Thémis, 2012

En 1990, le Groupe d'experts intergouvernemental sur l'dvolution du' climat (GIEC) concluait que la temperature moyenne sur Terre augmentait et qu'au rythme actuel elle continuerait d'augmenter de fagon alarmante durant tout le vingt-et-unibme sicle. Le GIEC revint A la charge en 2007, concluant que le richauffement de la plante 6tait <<sans 6quivoque>> et que les activitis 6taient <trs probablement A f'origine de ce richauffement climatique.

American Journal of International Law, 2010

This short piece analyzes the background and content of the Copenhagen Accord on climate change, which was agreed to last December by leaders of roughly 25 countries, including all of the world's major economies. Although the Copenhagen Accord is a political rather than a legal instrument and has been criticized by some as inadequate or worse, it represents a potentially significant breakthrough. On one side, developed countries agreed to put significant new funds on the table for climate change mitigation and adaptation, both for the short and medium terms, and committed to implement national economy-wide emissions targets for the post -2012 period, which will be internationally listed. On the other side, developing countries agreed for the first time to reflect their national mitigation actions in an international instrument and to subject their actions to some form of international review. The failure of the conference as a whole to adopt the Accord leaves its future uncertain. But if the participating states actually carry through on what they negotiated in Copenhagen, the bottom up architecture of the Accord could help encourage and reinforce national actions. In any event, as the most that world leaders could accept through direct negotiations under an intense international spotlight, the Copenhagen Accord may well represent the high-water mark of the climate change regime for some time to come.

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

The 26th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26), hosted in Glasgow in 2021, reaffirmed the guidelines assumed in 2015 around the “Paris Agreement” (COP21). Many of these guidelines, which are aimed at building pathways to net zero carbon emissions, translate publicly into techno-scientific promises, such as the global development of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). However, these promises are also questioned in the mass media by several actors. Both promises and criticisms are based on scientific reports produced or evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, dependent on the United Nations). In this sense, the set of criteria mobilized by the IPCC constitutes a framework for the debate. However, this framework generates a projection of the future based primarily on technical criteria that omit social plausibility and ignore the particular conditions of peripheral countries to achieve the...

2010

2014

This research focuses on climate change as a political process: it describes the Kyoto Protocol, its origins and ratification process in the international climate-diplomatic arena, as well as the climate strategy based on the United Nations' framework convention on climate change, its results and consequences. It views the issue of climate change as a decision-making problem focusing on the relationship between climate science, policy development and politics. This monograph revisits the scientific discussion on the topic and prepares an advanced synthesis and a bigger picture on developing policies for mitigating climate change. Some unpublished and previously unpublished sources like notes, e-mails, transcripts of meeting minutes and diaries are used for the description and analysis of UN Climate meetings and UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties (COP). Parts of this study feature elements of action research: the writer has participated as an active legislator in the topic at hand, as is the case for emissions trading. The study discusses climate change as a so-called wicked problem-i.e. a multi-faceted bundle of problems. To sum up, it can be said that the Protocol has not met the expectations. There are many reasons for this. The climate problem has been assumed to be more onedimensional than it is in reality-a wicked problem-, which has led to excessive simplification. The relationship between science and politics has been problematic in the field of climate science. The public demands more certainty and more precise information than science is able to provide. For the climate scientist, this implies a pressure to act as committed advocators rather than objective scientists. One of the core claims of this research is that preserving the epistemic or cognitivist ideal of science is still necessary in climate science. Otherwise, the error margin of the research risks increasing and even multiplying, when the value-laden preferences accumulate at the various levels of this interdisciplinary field. Researchers should not make political accentuations or risk assessments on behalf of the politician or decision-maker, but rather restrict their research to the production of information as reliable as possible. The study evaluates the main instruments of EU climate policy, such as emissions trading (ETS). It explains why such a genius system in theory has not been able to show its strength and results in practice for the EU. The overlapping legislation can be considered a key reason. Also the unilateral economic burden has proven to be problematic, when solving the global problem of climate change has been attempted by local means. Future climate policy is likely to be more practical and is composed of parallel elements. The special position of carbon dioxide may be challenged and the prevention of pollutants like black carbon will also be placed parallel to it. Reaching a global agreement is more and more unrealistic. Instead of setting emission ceilings the major emitters prefer technological investments and decarbonising the economy. If the EU desires a global climate policy it should approach the others and stop waiting for others to jump onto a Kyoto-type bandwagon. Emissions trading may well be functional as an emissionreduction instrument. It could also work well in the reduction of soot, i.e. black carbon, which is China's most urgent pollution problem.

To analyze how the world is doing regarding our current climate crisis, this essay reports on the reactions of three experts to the latest UN climate conference, COP28 (Dec. 2023)--David Wallace-Wells, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Bill McKibben. The first two, both journalists and authors of books on this crisis, assess the conference and how we’re presently doing as insufficient to halt climate worsening. McKibben is also a journalist and author, and skeptical about the gathering’s accomplishments. But he’s more of an activist than the other two skeptics. His reaction to COP28’s pledge to transition away from fossil fuels is that “it will only be a significant victory if we make it one.” Strong pressure on policymakers to follow through on their pledge must be applied.

Amsterdam Law Forum, 2010

2003