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What philosophy can contribute to the climate change debate
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“We do not yet have a good understanding of many of the ethical issues at stake in global-warming policy”. We remain confused about vital factors like who should take responsibility, equity between generations and how to think about nonhuman animals. This confusion, gives us reason for avoiding our obligations. Resistance by governments to taking action, attempts by various players to throw sand in the eyes of the public and specious arguments to justify an unwillingness to do what is necessary – “moral corruption”. The subversion of our moral discourse to our own endsClive Hamilton quoting Stephen Gardiner
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• The question of how we should address the impacts of climate change- both now and in the future
• The extent of our obligations to take action to reduce our emissions in order to limit global warming
• How best to understand the collective action necessary to address climate change
• The argument from skepticism and why we still face significant skepticism as to the causes of climate change
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How should we best address the impacts of climate change?
• “CO2 concentration has ranged between 172 and 300 ppm for the past 800 000 years. In 2008, CO2 concentration has risen to a much higher 383 ppm. Global CO2 concentration has risen 37 per cent since the Industrial Revolution” CSIRO, 2011
http://www.csiro.au/Outcomes/Climate/Understanding/Humans-Changing-Climate/Atmospheric-greenhouse-gas-exceeds-pre-industrial-levels.aspx
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Global effects of climate change
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Precautionary principle
If an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to
the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls
on those taking the action.
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How to reduce impacts in the future?
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Cosmopolitanism• The increasing rise of capitalism and world-wide
trade and its theoretical reflections• The reality of ever expanding empires whose
reach extended across the globe• The voyages around the world and the
anthropological so-called ‘discoveries’ facilitated through these
• The renewed interest in Hellenistic philosophy• The emergence of a notion of human rights and a
philosophical focus on human reason
Kleingeld and Brown- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2002
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• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 1948, along with related covenants;
• The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992;
• The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992; • The Rio Declaration on the Environment and Development, 1992; • The UNESCO Declaration on the Responsibili- ties of the Present
Generations Towards Future Generations, 1997; • The Kyoto Protocol, 1997; • The Earth Charter, 2000, as recognized by the UNESCO General
Conference; • The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development, 2002; • The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights
(UDBHR), 2005.
Examples of Cosmopolitanism
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Game Theory
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Tim Soutphommasane
http://www.themonthly.com.au/ethics-climate-change-peter-singer-tim-soutphommasane-p2-2586
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SkepticismCSIRO
Second Annual Survey of Australian Attitudes to Climate Change: INTERIM REPORT 2011
Humans are causing climate change Climate change is a
natural fluctuation
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“The Earth has a 35 year thermal inertia and so… we’re waiting 35 years even to see the effects of what we did 35 years ago. So it would be another 30 years until we started to really see, even at the only 380 parts per million level that we’re doing now, what those effects are. And we’ll be at 550 parts per million by then – or more. It’s never been above 300. So there’s a serious debate over whether that will be very bad or not, but all we know is no matter what we do when we get there, there’s no turning back."
Dr. Nathan LewisProfessor of ChemistryCalifornia Institute of Technology
Earth’s 35 year thermal inertia
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The detail of modern science is incomprehensible to almost everyone, which means that we have to take what scientists say on trust. Yet science tells us to trust nothing, to believe only what can be demonstrated. This contradiction is fatal to public confidence
George Monbiot
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Natural variations and climate change
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The argument against skepticism
“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' [linking smoking with disease] that exists in the mind of
the general public”1969, Brown and Williamson
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Attitudes to climate change based on political affiliation
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