ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores that climate change is an impure subject-matter: it mixes politics, science, economics, morality, and epistemology, and often the blend amounts to an entangled heap of difficult puzzles, tentative hypotheses and contested assumptions. Climate change is the only topic in contemporary politics about which people quarrel not only on substantive political solutions, but even on the very fact that the problem at stake is really occurring. As many readers might know, sceptics deny the very fact that dangerous anthropogenic climate change is obtaining and will continue to obtain in the next centuries. Air warmed by the greenhouse effect melts the top surface of the ice-sheet; the resulting water leaks through fissures, lubricating the slip and speeding the seaward flow of glaciers. The volume closes with a venture in environmental aesthetics.
