ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at three of these global concerns—climate change, the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic, and population—and at how people do define them as problems and agree on ways to deal with them. The trouble is there has never been a global consensus of this scale. It is true that the inventory of generally accepted social facts has been increasing for centuries, the concept of the world itself being one of the more basic of these. Scientists have constructed numerous different scenarios of how much greenhouse gases will accumulate in the future, but they generally believe that the amount of CO2 will double by the end of the century. The global epidemic of AIDS is one of the worst plagues of all time and it is both effect and cause of globalization. The science of demography, an early manifestation of the global information society, made data on human population growth much more accurate and widely available.
