Climate change and global risk
Climate change is among the most talked about and investigated global risks. No other environmental issue receives quite as much attention in the popular press, even though the impacts of pandemics and asteroid strikes, for instance, may be much more severe. Since the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 1990, significant progress has been made in terms of (1) establishing the reality of anthropogenic climate change and (2) understanding enough about the scale of the problem to establish that it warrants a public policy response. However, considerable scientific uncertainty remains. In particular scientists have been unable to narrow the range of the uncertainty in the global mean temperature response to a doubling of carbon dioxide from pre-industrial levels, although we do have a better understanding of why this is the case. Advances in science have, in some ways, made us more uncertain, or at least aware of the uncertainties generated by previously unexamined processes. To a considerable extent these new processes, as well as familiar processes that will be stressed in new ways by the speed of twentyfirst century climate change, underpin recent heightened concerns about the possibility of catastrophic climate change. Discussion of ‘tipping points’ in the Earth system (for instance Kemp, 2005; Lenton, 2007) has raised awareness of the possibility that climate change might be considerably worse than we have previously thought, and that some of the worst impacts might be triggered well before they come to pass, essentially suggesting the alarming image of the current generation having lit the very long, slow-burning fuse on a climate bomb that will cause great devastation to future generations. Possible mechanisms through which such catastrophes could play out have been developed by scientists in the last 15 years, as a natural output of increased scientific interest in Earth system science and, in particular, further investigation of the deep history of climate. Although scientific discussion of such possibilities has usually been characteristically guarded and responsible, the same probably cannot be said for the public debate around such notions.