Brave New Arctic Serreze, Mark C
2018, 2018., 20180417, 2018-04-10, Letnik:
30
eBook
In the 1990s, researchers in the Arctic noticed that floating summer sea ice had begun receding. This was accompanied by shifts in ocean circulation and unexpected changes in weather patterns ...throughout the world. The Arctic's perennially frozen ground, known as permafrost, was warming, and treeless tundra was being overtaken by shrubs. What was going on? Brave New Arctic is Mark Serreze's riveting firsthand account of how scientists from around the globe came together to find answers.
Providing an up-to-date synthesis of all knowledge relevant to the climate change issue, this book ranges from the basic science documenting the need for policy action to the technologies, economic ...instruments and political strategies that can be employed in response to climate change. Ethical and cultural issues constraining the societal response to climate change are also discussed. This book provides a handbook for those who want to understand and contribute to meeting this challenge. It covers a very wide range of disciplines - core biophysical sciences involved with climate change (geosciences, atmospheric sciences, ocean sciences, ecology/biology) as well as economics, political science, health sciences, institutions and governance, sociology, ethics and philosophy, and engineering. As such it will be invaluable for a wide range of researchers and professionals wanting a cutting-edge synthesis of climate change issues, and for advanced student courses on climate change.
Climate change is genuinely global, dominantly intergenerational, and takes place in a setting where our prescriptive theories are weak. This “perfect moral storm” poses a profound challenge to ...humanity. This book explains the storm, how it makes sense of our current malaise, and why better ethics can help. This book argues that despite decades of awareness, we are currently accelerating hard into the climate problem in a way that defies standard explanations. It claims that this suggests that our current focus on the scientific and economic questions is too narrow, and that the tendency to see the political problem as a traditional tragedy of the commons facing nation states is too optimistic. Instead, the key issue is that the current generation, and especially the most affluent, are in a position to pass on most of the costs of their behavior (and especially the most serious harms) to the global poor, future generations and nonhuman nature. This tyranny of the contemporary is a deeper problem than the traditional tragedy of the commons. Moreover, the book argues that this diagnosis helps to explain both the past failures of international climate policy (e.g., the “shadow solutions” of Kyoto and Copenhagen), and the current push towards geoengineering. Part of the solution, it argues, is better public ethics. We must work harder on articulating both the ethical problem, and moral constraints on solutions. In addition, there is a role for “defensive” moral and political philosophy, aimed at preserving the quality of public discourse.
Bringing together many of the world's leading experts, this volume is a comprehensive, state-of-the-art review of climate change science, impacts, mitigation, adaptation, and policy. It provides an ...integrated assessment of research on the key topics that underlie current controversial policy questions. The first part of the book addresses recent topics and findings related to the physical-biological earth system. The next part of the book surveys estimates of the impacts of climate change for different sectors and regions. The third part examines current topics related to mitigation of greenhouse gases and explores the potential roles of various technological options. The last part focuses on policy design under uncertainty. Dealing with the scientific, economic and policy questions at the forefront of the climate change issue, this book will be invaluable for graduate students, researchers and policymakers interested in all aspects of climate change and the issues that surround it.
The Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has presented strong evidence that human-induced climate change is occurring and that all countries of the world ...will be affected and need to adapt to impacts. The IPCC points out that many developing countries are particularly vulnerable because of their relatively low adaptive capacity. Therefore it is seen as a development priority to help these countries enhance their adaptive capacity to climate change. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Stratus Consulting organized a workshop in the fall of 2001 to develop an agenda for research on how best to enhance the capacity of developing countries to adapt to climate change. This research agenda is relevant for governments and institutions that wish to support developing countries in adapting to climate change. The workshop brought together experts from developing and industrialized countries, non-governmental organizations, and multilateral and bilateral donor organizations to discuss a number of important topics related to adaptation, adaptive capacity and sustainable development. A dozen papers were commissioned to cover these topics, both from a theoretical perspective and in the form of national case studies. The papers form the basis for this important book, which presents the latest interdisciplinary knowledge about the nature and components of adaptive capacity and how it may be strengthened.
Global Ethics and Climate Change combines the science of climate change with ethical critique to expose its impact, the increasing intensity of dangerous trends – particularly growing global ...affluence, material consumption and pollution – and the intensifying moral dimensions of changes to the environment. It shows you that global justice is vital to mitigating climate change.
In Thinking Like a Climate Hannah Knox confronts the challenges that climate change poses to knowledge production and modern politics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among policy makers, ...politicians, activists, scholars, and the public in Manchester, England—birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—Knox explores the city's strategies for understanding and responding to deteriorating environmental conditions. Climate science, Knox argues, frames climate change as a very particular kind of social problem that confronts the limits of administrative and bureaucratic techniques of knowing people, places, and things. Exceeding these limits requires forging new modes of relating to climate in ways that reimagine the social in climatological terms. Knox contends that the day-to-day work of crafting and implementing climate policy and translating climate knowledge into the work of governance demonstrates that local responses to climate change can be scaled up to effect change on a global scale.
