ABSTRACT
There is growing world-wide momentum to address the problem of climate change. Scientists now have high confidence that rapid, human-induced climate change and many measurable impacts are already at hand, and that further, more severe impacts can be expected in the future as changes continue, with the potential for catastrophic changes if the drivers of humaninduced climate change are not curbed. Thus, we face immediate societal choices about how to reduce both the drivers of climate change, primarily greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning, and the harmful consequences that cannot be avoided for vulnerable populations and regions. This chapter examines how the interactions between science, policy, politics and the media have shaped the course of the public policy debate over climate change, with a specific focus on the USA (where many of the most contentious and influential debates over climate change have played out). Given the essential need for the USA to ‘walk the walk’ of domestic climate policy before most other nations in the world will commit to serious long-term reductions, what happens in the USA is a bellwether for what will likely occur internationally in the formal negotiating process. We discuss the different standards by which scientific and political debates are governed, how these debates are portrayed by the media (which often serve as a conduit by which the public and politicians learn about scientific information), and how political considerations have often overwhelmed scientific considerations. We also comment on ways to improve the interaction between science and politics in the context of climate change. To clearly distinguish between consensus and contention, and to understand what consensus actually means in a complex systems science like climate change, are tasks incumbent on us all. First, though, it is important to understand the current state of scientific
knowledge of climate change.
