About "Climate Wars"

Synopsis:
Aside from finding the specific causes of climate change, the global community is challenged with preventing ecological catastrophes from destroying established communities. Social psychologist Harald Welzer argues that climate change has led to increasingly adverse living conditions across the globe and that these living conditions are contributing to economic and social catastrophes, civil war, and growing refugee populations. These populations lack basic necessities like clean drinking water, food, and shelter. Out of such living conditions, social unrest and violence often arise.

One of the reasons why we are finding it so difficult to mitigate climate change at all, Welzer argues, is because of an inherent absence of responsibility. Moreover, because the climate system is sluggish, any change will occur slowly. What could be done – if anything were actually done – would have no visible or tangible effects for decades. In contrast with disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes, climate change will never be over at any one point. At the time, the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Indonesia not only exceeded our powers of imagination but also swamped relief agencies’ disaster response plans and capacities. How, then, should we conceive of an impending catastrophe we know about but cannot directly measure, one that will cause global upheaval? Does western belief in progress – and its sister conviction that there is no such thing as a problem that cannot be solved – even permit us to make a sensible assessment of the dimension of this problem? If so, what practical conclusions should we draw?