ABSTRACT
Climate change poses two different kinds of risk that can roughly be characterized in two ways. First, it poses the risk of a large, rapid, relatively linear change; and second, climate change poses the risk of an even larger, more rapid, non-linear change. Climate change also seems to present us with another challenge to our notion of ethical responsibility. Individual moral responsibility, it provides us with the political challenge of securing global justice. Prudential responsibility centres on responsibilities that one has to oneself while ethical responsibility centres on responsibilities that one has to others. Climate change will have distributional effects and the model of humanity as a single agent cannot adequately reflect such distributional conflicts. The climate change issue can be seen at its core as centring on rich people appropriating more than their share of a global public good and, in addition, harming poor people by causally contributing to extreme climatic events, such as droughts, hurricanes and heat waves.
