Climate has for a long time been a taken-for-granted background against which social, political and economic interactions have taken place. But this taken-for-granted background is cleaving. It is becoming hard to ignore the potential repercussions of a changing climate, and the uneven impact of certain forms of human society and energy cultures that risk undermining their own environmental conditions.
In a comprehensive and accessible way, this book:
Drawing on the insights of various disciplines and citing numerous examples, Society and Climate probes the interplay between society, science and climate, and warns against making any easy assumptions.
Contents:
- Introduction: Society, Nature, Climate:
- The Nature of Weather
- The Climate of Science
- The Climate of Society
- Climates of Disagreement
- Climate as Scientific Object:
- Climate as Average Weather
- Measuring the Climate
- The Emergence of a New Paradigm
- The Discovery of the 'Greenhouse Effect'
- Modelling the Climate
- Climate as Possible Weather
- Climate as Cycle and Change:
- The History of the Science of Climate Change
- Natural Climate Variability
- Anthropogenic Climate Change
- Measuring and Modelling Climate Change
- The Impact and Inequality of Climate Change
- Understanding Change?
- Climate as Determinant:
- Climate Works?
- Ellsworth Huntington
- Climate Determinism: A Critique
- Climate Determinism: A Revival?
- Climate Matters
- Climate as Public Perception:
- Trusting the Climate
- Mistrusting the Climate
- Distrusting the Science
- Social Change?
- Climate as a Policy Issue:
- Scientific Policy
- Economic Policy
- Regulatory Policy
- Climate Policy: Who Decides?
- Summary and Prospects
Readership: Undergraduate students studying or contemplating the study of environmental science, and readers interested in understanding the relationship between climate, society, and science, and the potential socio-political implications of these processes. Climate Change;Society;Science;Politics;Anthropocene00