The scientification of climate politics

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 Some unpublished and previously unpublished sources like notes, e-mails, transcripts of meeting minutes and diaries are used for the description and analysis of UN Climate meetings and UNFCCC Conferences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.

2010

Current opinion in …, 2010

SCIREA Journal of Environment, 2021

The current global warming context is being experienced by world populations through the extreme whether events, sea level rise, loss of biodiversity, increase rise of temperature, re-insurgence of climate-related diseases and important slow and sudden-onset environmental catastrophes enhanced or accelerated by climate change among others. In such context, the global community, supported by evidenced science research are relentlessly calling for urgent climate actions to avoid reaching the point of non-return. Unfortunately, despite the fact that our planet continues to be under such threats of irreversible climate destruction, a fraction of scientists and political leaders motivated either by their nostalgic attachment to the carbon-driven developmental era or pushed by the fossil fuel industry and its influential capacity on decision-making processes and decision-makers, continue to develop negationist theories, with the aim of creating skeptical mindsets and maintaining some doubts in public opinions as far as the very fact of global warming and the role of human activities in the occurrence of such warming are concerned. In such controversial context, it is more than ever important to revisit the key drivers of the climate crisis, the historical path that led not only to the climate conscience building, but also and above all to its gradual politicization, and the key ideologies supporting the positions of both climate change defenders and climate-skeptics and deniers. This article, using a combination of bibliographic research and descriptive methodologies, intends to investigate that historical path and cover the resulting knowledge gap, through an ideology-based and chronical presentation of facts.

Evidence & Policy: A Journal of Research, Debate and Practice

Progress in Human Geography, 2011

Syllabus. This graduate-level seminar provides a unique perspective on contemporary debates about climate change through a study of their long history. After some background about climate science and a look at how scientists and politicians thought about climate in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, the main body of the course explores the co-evolution of climate science, politics, and global governance since World War II. A series of political issues and debates established the reality of human effects on the global atmosphere: nuclear fallout in the 1940s, weather modification in the 1950s, The Limits to Growth and the supersonic transport in the 1960s and 1970s, the ozone hole and nuclear winter in the 1980s. Meanwhile, climate science made enormous advances, with the rise of computer modeling and global observing systems. We then turn to how climate change rose to the top of the global political agenda in the 1990s and 2000s, and the disinformation campaigns that emerged to delay policy action. In the final weeks of the course, we examine the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris agreement. Finally, we’ll look at policy issues likely to arise in the coming decades, including climate refugees, massive adaptation projects, and geo-engineering. The principal assignment is a research paper or policy brief on a topic of your choosing.

2020

The politics of climate change are complex due to numerous factors that arise from the global economy's complex interdependence on carbon dioxide emitting hydrocarbon energy sources and because carbon dioxide is directly implicated in global warming making global warming a non-traditional environmental challenge. Climate change is a straight forward science which is understood by many scientists and nonscientist alike. But climate change science, evidences, impacts, mitigation and adaptation have been unduly politicized because of the economic, developmental and strategic interests of nations (developed and developing) and multinational oil companies who benefit from the fossil fuel-driven economy. This paper highlights how United States of America, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world failed to ratify the Kyoto protocol which is a global treaty entered into since 1997 to reduce the global emissions of the four principal greenhouse gases (Co 2, NH 4, NO 2 and CFCs). Also highlighted is China which is currently the 2 nd largest economy and projected to surpass USA as the highest global emitter of greenhouse gases in the next two decades. The areas of discord that have stalled many climate change conferences and negotiations between the developed countries and developing countries such as transfer of technology, intellectual property rights, payment of reparations, green funds, mitigation versus adaption have all been carefully treated in this paper. The position of this paper is that the politics of climate change is a major distraction and it amounts to the proverbial fiddling why Rome burns. The global community should therefore jettison politics and face the reality of climate change headlong with a view to saving humanity and the environment from this "global time bomb" called climate change.

2015

Climate change policies present multiple quandaries to the field of public policy and science studies. Despite the prevalent scientific consensus, approaches demonstrate great heterogeneity. With one side advocating for the facticity of climate change and a pro-active stance, while the other argues about negative economic trade-offs, viewpoints diverge. Between controversy and risk, and consensus and trust, deliberations on how to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change remain polarized. This essay compares the politics and divergent styles of climate change policymaking adopted in the EU and US. It hypothesizes whether the EU’s technocratic system of governance, when compared to the US populist system, is more conducive to evidence-based scientific climate policies. Followed by an analysis of the drivers and deterrents of policy that set apart the approaches of each polity, it is concluded that notwithstanding the prominent scientific dimension of climate change, as a p...