Integrating political and technological uncertainty into robust climate policy
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Integrating political and technological uncertainty into robust climate policy Leslie Paul Thiele 1 Received: 7 April 2020 / Accepted: 26 August 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
As climate change is unlikely to follow a linear path, climate policies should anticipate varied outcomes and be flexibly responsive. The case for such “robust policy” is compelling. However, advocates of robust approaches to policymaking often understate the challenge, as the variability of climate is just one of at least three interactive arenas of uncertainty that require attention. Emerging technologies will have a significant but indeterminate impact on climate adaptation and mitigation efforts. Uncertainty is also heightened because politics is an arena of disruptive change. The development of robust climate policy given the convergence of unknowns in the climatic, technological, and political realms entails three components: (1) diverse, distributed, and transparent participation; (2) safe-to-fail experimentation; and (3) exploratory foresight. Keywords Climate change . Uncertainty . Politics . Technology . Robust policy Climate change poses grave risks. Death, injury, ill health, and disrupted livelihoods for hundreds of millions may result from storm surges, coastal flooding, sea level rise, and extreme weather events. In turn, fresh water shortages, depletion of marine and coastal ecosystems resources, loss of marine and terrestrial ecological services, and agricultural degradation caused by drought, flooding, rising temperatures, and precipitation variability are likely. These harms are to be expected if current trends continue (IPCC 2014). But scientists acknowledge that climate change may accelerate with little warning, significantly increasing its impact. Rapid shifts in atmospheric carbon and temperatures may occur owing to a number of selfreinforcing feedback loops, including the loss of tropical rainforests caused by warming that inhibits a biome’s capacity to generate its own humid microclimate, the release of frozen gas hydrates from the sea floor and methane from thawing northern permafrost, and extra heat
* Leslie Paul Thiele [email protected]
1
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Climatic Change
absorbed by the planet when all floating Arctic ice melts—a process occurring much more rapidly than scientists once predicted. In light of such prospects, Lovelock (2009, 7, 44) writes: Do not expect the climate to follow the smooth path of slowly but sedately rising temperatures…. The real Earth changes by fits and starts with spells of constancy, even slight decline, between the jumps to greater heat. Climate change is not at all like the smooth civil engineering of a major highway that climbs uninterruptedly up a mountain pass, but more like the mountain itself, a concatenation of slopes, valleys, flat meadows, rock steps, and precipices. The ragged topography of climate change stymies reliable prediction as it “involves uncertainties in a breathtaking number of dimensions” (Heal and Kriström 2002, 34
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