ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the issue of climate change as the most mediatised and heatedly debated environmental concern in the entire Sustainability debate. Whereas environmental issues like resource depletion, waste, and emissions, as well as overpopulation, were important until the mid-1980s, global warming and climate change increasingly dominated the debate afterwards. We will start off with a look at the science behind climate change and how our present knowledge about the interrelation of green house gases (GHG), industrial processes, and global warming has evolved. Special attention is paid to the hybrid nature of knowledge production within the frame set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Then we focus on the unsustainability of climate change given current trajectories, not just from an environmental point of view but from its social and political consequences: climate change as an inherent socio-political phenomenon. The movement of the issue of climate change in both time and discursive space from science to politics and economics will be looked into in more detail below, with a special emphasis on the controversies around climate change that were all of a rather non-scientific nature. In the final part of this chapter, we take a
look at the current and future trends in the politics of climate change and what major strategies, worldviews and ideas are struggling with each other.
The scientific analysis of climate change, its causes and its consequences is much older than recent debates suggest. In the early nineteenth century, French mathematician Jean Baptiste Fourier developed what he called an analytical theory of heat in which he connected intake of solar radiation and its effect on atmospheric gases to changing temperatures on the planet (Fleming, 1999). Whereas Fourier focused more on the influence of the sun and other celestial bodies, Irish physicist John Tyndall was the first to demonstrate that different atmospheric gases absorb heat to different degrees, thus discovering the chemical foundations of the greenhouse effect (Fleming, 2005). On a side note, Tyndall proclaimed that he was both a materialist as well as a pantheist, seeking to unite objective knowledge with moral and emotional nature. Being close to writers like Emerson and Fichte, he could probably be described in today’s terms as a deep ecologist (Barton, 1987). In most historical accounts of the emergence of climate science, the title of father is usually ascribed to the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, one of the founders of the field of physical chemistry. He developed a theory to explain the occurrence of the ice ages depending on the amount of carbon dioxide available in the atmosphere in 1896. He further coined the notion of a ‘hot house’ that successively became well-known as greenhouse effect (Rodhe, Charlson & Crawford, 1997). Arrhenius was mostly occupied with the possibility of a new cooling of the Earth’s climate and concluded that if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would drop to fifty per cent compared to the late nineteenth century, global surface temperatures would fall by four to five degrees Celsius. However, he also acknowledged that the flipside of his calculations implied that doubling CO2 levels would result in a similar rise of global temperatures. Arrhenius even connected such a possibility to the increase of coal burning in industrial processes but foresaw this for a very distant future. In the following decades, Arrhenius’s work was criticised with regard to the data he used and his estimates, as well as with regard to the assumptions of his theory in general.
