Public Policy and Global Warming

There are many uncertainties concerning climate change, but a rough international consensus has emerged that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from its pre-industrial baseline is likely to lead to a 2.5 degree centigrade increase in the earth’s mean surface temperature by the middle of the next century. Such a warming would have diverse impacts on human activities and would likely be catastrophic for many plants and nonhuman animals. The author’s contention is that the problems engendered by the possibility of climate change are not purely scientific but also concern how we ought to live and how humans should relate to each other and to the rest of nature; and these are problems of ethics and politics. There has been speculation about the possibility of anthropogenic global warming since at least the late nineteenth century (Arrhenius 1896, 1908). At times the prospect of such a warming has been welcomed, for it has been thought that it would increase agricultural productivity and delay the onset of the next ice age (Callendar 1938). Other times, and more recently, the prospect of global warming has been the stuff of &dquo;doomsday narratives,&dquo; as various writers have focused on the possibility of widespread drought, flood, famine, and the economic and political dislocations that might result from a &dquo;greenhouse warming&dquo;-induced climate change (Flavin 1989). Although high-level meetings have been convened to discuss the green