Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
review research papers. This doesn't mean they are to be trusted uncriti-
cally, of course, as we saw in
Chapter 6
regarding West African forest loss
discourses. But when thousands of earth surface scientists worldwide agree
that significant environmental change lies ahead of us, in the form of the
periodic Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, we
should at least pay attention.
Clearly, if scientists like Anderson and Bows are right, then global cli-
mate change poses some momentous questions that demand profound
answers and which will, in turn, require significant actions by people world-
wide. As one British religious leader, David Atkinson, Anglican Bishop of
Thetford, phrases it:
...
...
Climate change is
questions about human life and
destiny, about our relationship to the planet and to each other, about altruism
and selfishness, about the place of a technological mindset in our attitudes to
the world, about our values, hopes and goals, and about our obligations in the
present and for the future.
opening up for us
(Atkinson, 2008: 28)
In short, the ethical and practical implications of climate change on the
scale projected by Anderson and Bows are extraordinarily
wide and deep
-
wider and deeper than almost anything we can imagine, bar a meteor striking
the Earth or a nuclear war. This is why environmental campaign groups such
as Greenpeace have been echoing the claims of climate scientists in a more
passionate and vocal idiom. However, alarming as these implications are,
from the perspective of publics, climate change is a difficult phenomena to
conceive of.
Study Task:
How often do you think about 'global climate change' in your
daily life? When you think about it, what images, if any, come into your
mind? Do these images seem real, the stuff of fiction or about a future
that's too far away to worry about?
Why is climate change hard for publics to register seriously? First, its local
affects will be (are) spatially uneven and are currently barely perceptible in
many places. Second, the time lags characteristic of change in large, open
biophysical systems mean that current lifestyles are having major environ-
mental effects, but ones that won't be tangible for decades. Third, the sheer
difficulty of trying to predict the future of multi-scalar biogeochemical pro-
cesses means there's considerable uncertainty about precisely when and how
their effects will be felt. Together, these three things arguably give climate
trio is the assumption that the earth's climate (a form of 'universal nature',
to use my shorthand from
Chapter 1)
exists separately from us, an 'external
