Are we Doomed? A Climate Conversation
Keywords:
climate change, climate science, interpretation of science, collapse, IPCCAbstract
Currently there is significant disagreement among climate scientists about how much aggregate global temperature is likely to change by the end of the century, and what the direct impacts such changes will look like. There is also to date little sustained systematic discussion, including within academia, and within that, amongst environmental humanists, of the extent to which climate change poses a challenge for human civilization as a whole. Given the disagreement about temperature rise and its impacts, how should interested non-specialists approach these crucial issues that depend upon a baseline knowledge of climate science and predicted scenarios generated by international bodies such as the IPCC? Given the importance of credible threats to civilization from various global heating scenarios, how should we engage seriously with such an interdisciplinary issue? In this article we present and model a dialogue between two environmental humanists, where the dialogue is based on incommensurate views regarding perceived climate futures and their impacts on global civilization. One interlocutor is a philosopher with a background in environmental ethics, who tends to accept the projections of large assessments like that of the IPCC. The other is a religion and nature scholar who accepts that such large assessments are likely too conservative in their predictions about the impacts of climate change come 2100 CE. In doing so, we rehearse the substantive issues of debates around temperature rise and climate change’s risk to civilization in language aimed at non-specialists. We also explore various meta-level questions about how non-specialists should best engage with these debates within the academy.
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