Global Climate Disruption : From Mitigation to Adaptation to Recovery
In this paper, I suggest a significant shift in the international approach to dealing with climate change. There remains a rhetoric of “this is what we can do to make it better,” with little recognition of the ability, or rather, likely inability of international cooperation to make meaningful progress on slowing climate change or to, ultimately, transition to a global system that can sustain human civilization in the long-term. In short, as global warming accelerates, global politics remains in slow motion. I suggest that the degree of change and complexity that climate change poses is such that it will continue to overwhelm the capacity of international cooperation to cope with it. This necessitates, not an abandonment of an effort to mitigate the causes and consequences of global warming, but a significant shift in emphasis toward adapting to the profound changes in the climate and ecosystems of the earth that are likely to occur over the next century. In order to meaningfully mitigate the effects of climate change, a drastic reduction in GHG emissions is needed, which could only be achieved through a dramatic boost of energy replacement. The most recent research suggests that, in order to prevent more than two degrees of warming, emissions must peak by 2015 and must decline by at least 6% per year after that, leading to an almost complete decarbonization of the world economy by 2050. In contrast, the relatively ambitious goal of the European Union, which has also been adopted by President-elect Obama, is an 80% reduction by 2050. This translates to a reduction of "only" 2% per year. The most widely accepted models indicate that this would lead to a warming of four to five degrees, jeopardizing human civilization as we know it. Meanwhile, emissions continue to grow. The core problem is one of timing and the structure of modern world society. Global warming is likely to proceed very rapidly, while the inertia of social, economic, and political systems and technology is significant. As seen from the perspective of modern social systems theory, modern world society is functionally differentiated in subsystems such as the economy, politics, science, education, etc. These function systems operate so efficiently precisely because they are largely autonomous in fulfilling their functions through their organizations and programs. The key structural problem is that the political system is not the head or the center of world society, as many leading theories in political science posit, but is just one among several systems, and cannot sufficiently guide or even steer other systems, such as the economy. In a functionally differentiated world society, there is no position from which a collectively binding description of the world and all of its problems, including climate change, could be formulated, and at which collectively binding decisions could be made and effectively implemented. This needs to be much more clearly acknowledged, and the focus must shift to developing realistic approaches to facilitating adaptation to the likely consequences of global warming
Year of publication: |
2016
|
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Authors: | Brauner, Wolfgang |
Publisher: |
[S.l.] : SSRN |
Subject: | Klimawandel | Climate change | Welt | World | Klimaschutz | Climate protection | Treibhausgas-Emissionen | Greenhouse gas emissions |
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freely available
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