Introduction
Despite all the international
efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the concentration of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere continues to increase at a steady rate. Even
the full commitment of policymakers against climate change and
implementation of the Paris Agreement would not be enough to prevent
global warming by the end of this century. Climate change is defined as
a global commons problem with temporal and spatial dimensions where the
differentiation of responsibilities and vulnerabilities threatens global
action (Gardiner, 2006).
To solve the problem of spatial and temporal dimensions, scientists use
climate models to assess the costs of action and inaction both globally
and also in a time horizon until the end of the 21st century. At the
core of these models lies human activities creating additional radiative
forcing to earth with scale on the same degree compared to natural
radiative forcing – mainly from solar and geochemical cycles –
causing climate variability which started long before human
civilizations appeared on earth. Climate change was perceived positively
as prevention of another ice age at the beginning of the 20th century
whereas scientists nowadays also consider climate extreme events such as
the stopping of Thermo-haline circulation or the albedo effect from
melting of continental and sea ice in polar regions (Hulme, 2008).
However, both the temporal and spatial distance of these events and also
the uncertainties underlying the empirical evidence leave us in a
situation of difficulty to act.
As the future is uncertain, modellers have developed climate future
narratives as a baseline to cover the different pathways through which
human societies as a whole could evolve until the end of the 21st
century. These directions are referred to as shared socioeconomic
pathways which are characterized depending on the level of challenges to
climate mitigation and adaptation. This is the problem of the
utilitarian where climate mitigation efforts require the reduction of
total welfare whereas increasing welfare could also be directed to
climate adaptation efforts (Berdinesen, 2018). However, decision making
for welfare maximization which doesn’t consider environmental
externalities and doesn’t act according to environmental virtues risk
losing everything in case of a climate extreme event.
Also as current greenhouse gas emissions will determine the extent of
climate change in the future, the temporal dimension of actions require
the development of additional shared policy assumptions depending on
largely uncertain discount rates used for comparing the welfare of
current and future generations (Cafaro, 2011). Placing nature as our
locus of environmental value requires also the fair distribution of
resources between humans and other species while respecting the climate
as life supporting and regulating system. Despite human civilizations
have consumed nearly half of the global carbon budget in the atmosphere
defined by climate target under the Paris Agreement (Alcaraz et
al. , 2019), we have not been able to develop feasible environmental
ethics towards our climate which supported our welfare during the
Holocene geological epoch.