ABSTRACT
In 1896, the Swedish physicist and chemist Svante Arrhenius speculated that carbon dioxide emissions could lead to global warming through a greenhouse gas effect. In 2007 – 111 years later – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global network of climate scientists set up by the United Nations, published its fourth report assessing research on this hypothesis, and concluded that Arrhenius was correct. Human activities, and especially anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, are forcing global climate change. The clarity and urgent tone of this report triggered a wave of speculation and research on the empirical and possible security implications of climate change. In this chapter, I briefly review the principal findings of climate science, and then discuss three important and emerging social science responses to this: (1) the argument that climate change poses a threat to national security, (2) the argument that climate change poses a threat to human security, and (3) the argument that climate change needs to be addressed explicitly in the context of peace and peacebuilding.1
