ABSTRACT
Over the past years, The Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change has yielded strong positions on our global climate. On October 26, 2021 at COP26, António Guterres, the Secretary General for the United Nation, declared “a Code Red for humanity,” going on to claim, “the alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable.” The evidence to which Guterres’ statement referenced was the sixth assessment report prepared by the working group of the United Nations’ International Governmental Panel on Climate Change. The findings of that report, prepared by 234 scientists working from around the globe, was that the world was fast approaching the agreed global warming limit of 1.5 degree Celsius of pre-industrial global temperatures 1 (Climate and the Environment). The secretary general’s call to code red, was an urgent call for global action presenting the steps to take in terms of actionable limits—limiting temperature change, limiting carbon emissions, and sometimes limiting action itself. One year later, in November 2022, the global discourse on climate limits has highlighted the inequity of unified global limits. The COP 27 summit, in Egypt, ended with a breakthrough agreement to provide “loss and damage” funding for vulnerable countries hit hard by climate disasters, as paid for by wealthier nations 2 (Scientific American). This call for reparations acknowledges that not all global populations are experiencing the consequences of climate change the same way, a sharp rebuke of Anthropocene literature, put forth by environmentalists and environmental humanities scholars, concerning the bundling of humanity into a unified “we.” within literature concerning the Anthropocene. 3 These debates underscore the irrefutable awareness that humanity’s actions are actively contributing to the change of our planet’s climatic conditions, but also force us to consider that the political and social climate surrounding our global environment is itself in a constant state of change.
