Download or read book A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change written by Bert Bolin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the global climate change issues emerge? The issue of human-induced global climate change became a major environmental concern during the twentieth century. In response to growing concern about human-induced global climate change, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988. Written by its first chairman, this book is an overview of the history of the IPCC. It describes and evaluates the intricate interplay between key factors in the science and politics of climate change, the strategy that has been followed, and the regretfully slow pace in getting to grips with the uncertainties that have prevented earlier action being taken. The book also highlights the emerging conflict between establishing a sustainable global energy system and preventing a serious change in global climate. This text provides researchers and policy makers with an insight into the history of the politics of climate change.
Download or read book Politics and Climate Change A History written by Andy May and published by Andy May Petrophysicist LLC. This book was released on 2022-09-04 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These are stories of the political corruption of science. Politicians work to forge a consensus, they use persuasion, intimidation, and avoid or suppress debate. Debating an issue leads to education, it shows the question is more complex than it appears, it makes the public consider all sides. Education leads to caution, not action. The politician wants a decision, he wants action, so no debate. Once the consensus is formed, the public votes, laws are passed, regulations issued, the minority concedes, and conflict is avoided. Science is not a belief. It exists to challenge the consensus view. It is how one person can show the overwhelming majority is mistaken. Scientists do not vote, they debate. They gather facts, make observations, and analyze the data and try to show the consensus opinion is wrong. Politicians and scientists don’t mix. They are like fire and water, opposites. But, what about when no one trusts the politician and he must have a scientist for back up? What happens when the government becomes the sole source of research money? We address the attempt by politicians to control scientific research and research outcomes. They do this by selectively funding projects that look for potential disasters, ideally global disasters. People love disaster stories, journalists love disaster stories, scientists love to be quoted in newspapers and on television. If you frighten people enough, they will give up their rights for security, increasing government power. So, it is not surprising that as government has taken over funding scientific research, scientists have migrated from research that helps people, to researching possible catastrophes, no matter how remote the possibility. Science has devolved from improving human lives to developing plots for disaster movies.
Download or read book The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change written by Andrew E. Dessler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the climate-change debate for non-specialists.
Download or read book Behind the Curve written by Joshua P. Howe and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1958, Charles David Keeling began measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. His project kicked off a half century of research that has expanded our knowledge of climate change. Despite more than fifty years of research, however, our global society has yet to find real solutions to the problem of global warming. Why? In Behind the Curve, Joshua Howe attempts to answer this question. He explores the history of global warming from its roots as a scientific curiosity to its place at the center of international environmental politics. The book follows the story of rising CO2—illustrated by the now famous Keeling Curve—through a number of historical contexts, highlighting the relationships among scientists, environmentalists, and politicians as those relationships changed over time. The nature of the problem itself, Howe explains, has privileged scientists as the primary spokespeople for the global climate. But while the “science first” forms of advocacy they developed to fight global warming produced more and better science, the primacy of science in global warming politics has failed to produce meaningful results. In fact, an often exclusive focus on science has left advocates for change vulnerable to political opposition and has limited much of the discussion to debates about the science itself. As a result, while we know much more about global warming than we did fifty years ago, CO2 continues to rise. In 1958, Keeling first measured CO2 at around 315 parts per million; by 2013, global CO2 had soared to 400 ppm. The problem is not getting better - it's getting worse. Behind the Curve offers a critical and levelheaded look at how we got here.
Download or read book The Discovery of Global Warming written by Spencer R. Weart and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2001 a panel representing virtually all the world's governments and climate scientists announced that they had reached a consensus: the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last ten millennia, and that warming was caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases from human activity. The consensus itself was at least a century in the making. The story of how scientists reached their conclusion--by way of unexpected twists and turns and in the face of formidable intellectual, financial, and political obstacles--is told for the first time in The Discovery of Global Warming. Spencer R. Weart lucidly explains the emerging science, introduces us to the major players, and shows us how the Earth's irreducibly complicated climate system was mirrored by the global scientific community that studied it. Unlike familiar tales of Science Triumphant, this book portrays scientists working on bits and pieces of a topic so complex that they could never achieve full certainty--yet so important to human survival that provisional answers were essential. Weart unsparingly depicts the conflicts and mistakes, and how they sometimes led to fruitful results. His book reminds us that scientists do not work in isolation, but interact in crucial ways with the political system and with the general public. The book not only reveals the history of global warming, but also analyzes the nature of modern scientific work as it confronts the most difficult questions about the Earth's future. Table of Contents: Preface 1. How Could Climate Change? 2. Discovering a Possibility 3. A Delicate System 4. A Visible Threat 5. Public Warnings 6. The Erratic Beast 7. Breaking into Politics 8. The Discovery Confirmed Reflections Milestones Notes Further Reading Index Reviews of this book: A soberly written synthesis of science and politics. --Gilbert Taylor, Booklist Reviews of this book: Charting the evolution and confirmation of the theory [of global warming], Spencer R. Weart, director of the Center for the History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics, dissects the interwoven threads of research and reveals the political and societal subtexts that colored scientists' views and the public reception their work received. --Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times Book Review Reviews of this book: It took a century for scientists to agree that gases produced by human activity were causing the world to warm up. Now, in an engaging book that reads like a detective story, physicist Weart reports the history of global warming theory, including the internal conflicts plaguing the research community and the role government has had in promoting climate studies. --Publishers Weekly Reviews of this book: It is almost two centuries since the French mathematician Jean Baptiste Fourier discovered that the Earth was far warmer than it had any right to be, given its distance from the Sun...Spencer Weart's book about how Fourier's initially inconsequential discovery finally triggered urgent debate about the future habitability of the Earth is lucid, painstaking and commendably brief, packing everything into 200 pages. --Fred Pearce, The Independent Reviews of this book: [The Discovery of Global Warming] is a well-written, well-researched and well-balanced account of the issues involved...This is not a sermon for the faithful, or verses from Revelation for the evangelicals, but a serious summary for those who like reasoned argument. Read it--and be converted. --John Emsley, Times Literary Supplement Reviews of this book: This is a terrific book...Perhaps the finest compliment I could give this book is to report that I intend to use it instead of my own book...for my climate class. The Discovery of Global Warming is more up-to-date, better balanced historically, beautifully written and, not least important, short and to the point. I think the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] needs to enlist a few good historians like Weart for its next assessment. --Stephen H. Schneider, Nature Reviews of this book: This short, well-written book by a science historian at the American Institute of Physics adds a serious voice to the overheated debate about global warming and would serve as a great starting point for anyone who wants to better understand the issue. --Maureen Christie, American Scientist Reviews of this book: I was very pleasantly surprised to find that Spencer Weart's account provides much valuable and interesting material about how the discipline developed--not just from the perspective of climate science but also within the context of the field's relation to other scientific disciplines, the media, political trends, and even 20th-century history (particularly the Cold War). In addition, Weart has done a valuable service by recording for posterity background information on some of the key discoveries and historical figures who contributed to our present understanding of the global warming problem. --Thomas J. Crowley, Science Reviews of this book: Weart has done us all a service by bringing the discovery of global warming into a short, compendious and persuasive book for a general readership. He is especially strong on the early days and the scientific background. --Crispin Tickell, Times Higher Education Supplement A Capricious Beast Ever since the days when he had trudged around fossil lake basins in Nevada for his doctoral thesis, Wally Broecker had been interested in sudden climate shifts. The reported sudden jumps of CO2 in Greenland ice cores stimulated him to put this interest into conjunction with his oceanographic interests. The result was a surprising and important calculation. The key was what Broecker later described as a "great conveyor belt'"of seawater carrying heat northward. . . . The energy carried to the neighborhood of Iceland was "staggering," Broecker realized, nearly a third as much as the Sun sheds upon the entire North Atlantic. If something were to shut down the conveyor, climate would change across much of the Northern Hemisphere' There was reason to believe a shutdown could happen swiftly. In many regions the consequences for climate would be spectacular. Broecker was foremost in taking this disagreeable news to the public. In 1987 he wrote that we had been treating the greenhouse effect as a 'cocktail hour curiosity,' but now 'we must view it as a threat to human beings and wildlife.' The climate system was a capricious beast, he said, and we were poking it with a sharp stick. I found the book enjoyable, thoughtful, and an excellent introduction to the history of what may be one of the most important subjects of the next one hundred years. --Clark Miller, University of Wisconsin The Discovery of Global Warming raises important scientific issues and topics and includes essential detail. Readers should be able to follow the discussion and emerge at the end with a good understanding of how scientists have developed a consensus on global warming, what it is, and what issues now face human society. --Thomas R. Dunlap, Texas A&M University
Download or read book Science as a Contact Sport written by Stephen H. Schneider and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schneider's firsthand account of a scientific and political odyssey, in which he navigates both the turbulent waters of the world's power structures and the arcane theater of academic debaters.
Download or read book Politics of Climate Change written by Anthony Giddens and published by Polity. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Climate change differs from any other problem that, as collective humanity, we face today. If it goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth. Yet for most people, and for many policy-makers too, it tends to be a 'back of the mind' issue. ... [This book] argues controversially, we do not have a systematic politics of climate change. Politics-as-usual won't allow us to deal with the problems we face, while the recipes of the main challenger to orthodox politics, the green movement, are flawed at source." - cover.
Download or read book Image Politics of Climate Change written by Birgit Schneider and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific research on climate change has given rise to a variety of images picturing climate change. These range from colorful expert graphics, model visualizations, photographs of extreme weather events like floods, droughts or melting ice, symbols like polar bears, to animated and interactive visualizations. Climate change graphics have not only increased knowledge about the subject, they have begun to influence popular awareness of global weather events. The status of climate pictures today is particularly crucial, as global climate change as a long-term process cannot be seen. When images are widely distributed, they are able to shape how the world is thought about and seen. It is this implicit basic assumption of the power of images to influence reality that this book addresses: today's images might become the blueprint for tomorrow's realities. »Image Politics of Climate Change« combines a wide interdisciplinary range of perspectives and questions, treated here in sixteen interdisciplinary case studies. The author's specializations include both visual practice and theory: in the fields of climate sciences, computer graphics, art, curating, art history and visual studies, communication and cultural science, environmental and science & technology studies. The close interlinking of these viewpoints promotes in-depth insights into issues of production and analysis of climate visualization.
Download or read book Making Climate Change History written by Joshua P. Howe and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection pulls together key documents from the scientific and political history of climate change, including congressional testimony, scientific papers, newspaper editorials, court cases, and international declarations. Far more than just a compendium of source materials, the book uses these documents as a way to think about history, while at the same time using history as a way to approach the politics of climate change from a new perspective. Making Climate Change History provides the necessary background to give readers the opportunity to pose critical questions and create plausible answers to help them understand climate change in its historical context; it also illustrates the relevance of history to building effective strategies for dealing with the climatic challenges of the future.
Download or read book Hubris The Troubling Science Economics and Politics of Climate Change written by Michael Hart and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015-10-21 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book explores problems and issues that have emerged in national and international discussion of policies to address climate change. It concludes that every solution put forward by the UN and activists poses more problems than might ever emerge from the marginal human impact on natural climate change. Rather than mitigation, governments should focus on adaptation. As is, climate change discussions have become captive of a utopian agenda that is using climate change as a stalking horse to drive alarm in the hope that it will convince governments to act."--
Download or read book The Politics of Climate Change and Uncertainty in India written by Lyla Mehta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together diverse perspectives concerning uncertainty and climate change in India. Uncertainty is a key factor shaping climate and environmental policy at international, national and local levels. Climate change and events such as cyclones, floods, droughts and changing rainfall patterns create uncertainties that planners, resource managers and local populations are regularly confronted with. In this context, uncertainty has emerged as a "wicked problem" for scientists and policymakers, resulting in highly debated and disputed decision-making. The book focuses on India, one of the most climatically vulnerable countries in the world, where there are stark socio-economic inequalities in addition to diverse geographic and climatic settings. Based on empirical research, it covers case studies from coastal Mumbai to dryland Kutch and the Sundarbans delta in West Bengal. These localities offer ecological contrasts, rural–urban diversity, varied exposure to different climate events, and diverse state and official responses. The book unpacks the diverse discourses, practices and politics of uncertainty and demonstrates profound differences through which the "above", "middle" and "below" understand and experience climate change and uncertainty. It also makes a case for bringing together diverse knowledges and approaches to understand and embrace climate-related uncertainties in order to facilitate transformative change. Appealing to a broad professional and student audience, the book draws on wide-ranging theoretical and conceptual approaches from climate science, historical analysis, science, technology and society studies, development studies and environmental studies. By looking at the intersection between local and diverse understandings of climate change and uncertainty with politics, culture, history and ecology, the book argues for plural and socially just ways to tackle climate change in India and beyond. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003257585, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Download or read book Changing the Atmosphere written by Clark A. Miller and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incorporating historical, sociological, and philosophical approaches, Changing the Atmosphere presents detailed empirical studies of climate science and its uptake into public policy.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Climate written by Wolfgang Behringer and published by Polity. This book was released on 2010 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the latest historical research on the development of the earth's climate, showing how even minor changes in the climate could result in major social, political, and religious upheavals.
Download or read book Unsettled written by Steven E. Koonin and published by BenBella Books. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Unsettled is a remarkable book—probably the best book on climate change for the intelligent layperson—that achieves the feat of conveying complex information clearly and in depth." —Claremont Review of Books "Surging sea levels are inundating the coasts." "Hurricanes and tornadoes are becoming fiercer and more frequent." "Climate change will be an economic disaster." You've heard all this presented as fact. But according to science, all of these statements are profoundly misleading. When it comes to climate change, the media, politicians, and other prominent voices have declared that "the science is settled." In reality, the long game of telephone from research to reports to the popular media is corrupted by misunderstanding and misinformation. Core questions—about the way the climate is responding to our influence, and what the impacts will be—remain largely unanswered. The climate is changing, but the why and how aren't as clear as you've probably been led to believe. Now, one of America's most distinguished scientists is clearing away the fog to explain what science really says (and doesn't say) about our changing climate. In Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters, Steven Koonin draws upon his decades of experience—including as a top science advisor to the Obama administration—to provide up-to-date insights and expert perspective free from political agendas. Fascinating, clear-headed, and full of surprises, this book gives readers the tools to both understand the climate issue and be savvier consumers of science media in general. Koonin takes readers behind the headlines to the more nuanced science itself, showing us where it comes from and guiding us through the implications of the evidence. He dispels popular myths and unveils little-known truths: despite a dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures actually decreased from 1940 to 1970. What's more, the models we use to predict the future aren't able to accurately describe the climate of the past, suggesting they are deeply flawed. Koonin also tackles society's response to a changing climate, using data-driven analysis to explain why many proposed "solutions" would be ineffective, and discussing how alternatives like adaptation and, if necessary, geoengineering will ensure humanity continues to prosper. Unsettled is a reality check buoyed by hope, offering the truth about climate science that you aren't getting elsewhere—what we know, what we don't, and what it all means for our future.
Download or read book Climate in Motion written by Deborah R. Coen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. She argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a patchwork of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Led by Julius Hann in Vienna, Habsburg scientists were the first to investigate precisely how local winds and storms might be related to the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Coen grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization. Climate in Motion presents the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world. In this way, it offers a critical historical perspective on the concepts of scale that structure thinking about the climate crisis today and the range of possibilities for responding to it.
Download or read book Our Biggest Experiment written by Alice Bell and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traversing science, politics, and technology, Our Biggest Experiment shines a spotlight on the little-known scientists who sounded the alarm to reveal the history behind the defining story of our age: the climate crisis. Our understanding of the Earth's fluctuating environment is an extraordinary story of human perception and scientific endeavor. It also began much earlier than we might think. In Our Biggest Experiment, Alice Bell takes us back to climate change science's earliest steps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the point when concern started to rise in the 1950s and right up to today, where the “debate” is over and the world is finally starting to face up to the reality that things are going to get a lot hotter, a lot drier (in some places), and a lot wetter (in others), with catastrophic consequences for most of Earth's biomes. Our Biggest Experiment recounts how the world became addicted to fossil fuels, how we discovered that electricity could be a savior, and how renewable energy is far from a twentieth-century discovery. Bell cuts through complicated jargon and jumbles of numbers to show how we're getting to grips with what is now the defining issue of our time. The message she relays is ultimately hopeful; harnessing the ingenuity and intelligence that has driven the history of climate change research can result in a more sustainable and bearable future for humanity.
Download or read book Climate Change Science and Policy written by Stephen H. Schneider and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2009-12-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the mcomprehensive and currreference resource on climate change available today. It features forty-nine individual chapters by some of the world’s leading climate scientists. Its five sections address climate change in five dimensions: ecological impacts, policy analysis, international considerations, United States considerations, and mitigation options to reduce carbon emissions. In many ways, this volume supersedes the Fourth AssessmReport of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Many important developments too recto be treated in the 2007 IPCC documents are covered here. Overall, Climate Change Science and Policy paints a direr picture of the effects of climate change than do the IPCC reports. It reveals that climate change has progressed faster than the IPCC reports anticipated and that the outlook for the future is bleaker than the IPCC reported.
