Discursive stability meets climate instability: A critical exploration of the concept of ‘climate stabilization’ in contemporary climate policy

Boykoff, Maxwell; Frame, David J.; Randalls, Samuel

doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.09.003

Cited by 47 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 70 publications

(65 reference statements)

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“…(2) and the relation DR f 5 5.35 ln(C/C 0 ), where C 0 is the preindustrial concentration (e.g., Cadule et al 2009). 14 Ultimately, stabilized CO 2 concentrations may not be the most helpful way of framing GHG goals (e.g., Allen et al 2009;Matthews et al 2009;Boykoff et al 2010), but they do give an important sense of the risks implied by different types of emission pathways. this paper's use of multiple priors could complement an ambiguity aversion framework for decision making (e.g., Klibanoff et al 2005Klibanoff et al , 2009.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Sensitivity Distributions Dependence on the Possibility that Models Share Biases

Lemoine

2010

Journal of Climate

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Uncertainty about biases common across models and about unknown and unmodeled feedbacks is important for the tails of temperature change distributions and thus for climate risk assessments. This paper develops a hierarchical Bayes framework that explicitly represents these and other sources of uncertainty. It then uses models' estimates of albedo, carbon cycle, cloud, and water vapor-lapse rate feedbacks to generate posterior probability distributions for feedback strength and equilibrium temperature change. The posterior distributions are especially sensitive to prior beliefs about models' shared structural biases: nonzero probability of shared bias moves some probability mass toward lower values for climate sensitivity even as it thickens the distribution's positive tail. Obtaining additional models of these feedbacks would not constrain the posterior distributions as much as narrowing prior beliefs about shared biases or, potentially, obtaining feedback estimates having biases uncorrelated with those impacting climate models. Carbon dioxide concentrations may need to fall below current levels to maintain only a 10% chance of exceeding official 28C limits on global average temperature change.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Sensitivity Distributions Dependence on the Possibility that Models Share Biases

Lemoine

2010

Journal of Climate

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“…This relationship is mutually reinforcing: the science identifies a situation at a global scale, and this view becomes the basis for the call for an international response to address the situation (Sarewitz & Pielke, 2007). Indeed, GCMs provide a way to stabilize a discourse of climate change (Boykoff, Frame, & Randalls, 2010). The measures, variables, practices and foci of climate science crystallized in GCMs are transferable across institutions and provide a summary of knowledge for the policy realm and for the public.…”

Section: Global Circulation Models and The Ipccmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate science and slow violence: A view from political geography and STS on mobilizing technoscientific ontologies of climate change

O’Lear

2016

Political Geography

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“…In this regard, trust can be considered as intertwined with a pragmatic calculation by policymakers in balancing what looked reasonable and politically/economically feasible, but also responding to societal concerns and requests of environmental movements (Randalls 2010(Randalls , 2011. The target offered a unifying element for policy engagement to lock-in multiple actors into a long-term commitment (Boykoff et al 2010). Yet, the target was simple, appealing and based on allegedly best available science.…”

Section: Framingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governing the transformation towards ‘nature-inclusive’ agriculture: insights from the Netherlands

Runhaar

2017

International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability

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Targets are widely employed in environmental governance. In this paper, we investigate the construction of the 2°C climate target, one of the best known targets in global environmental governance. Our paper examines this target through a historical reconstruction that identifies four different phases: framing, consolidation and diffusion, adoption, and disembeddedness. Our analysis shows that, initially, the target was science-driven and predominantly EU-based; it then became progressively accepted at the international level, despite a lack of broader debate among governments on the policy implications and required measures for implementation. Once the 2°C target was endorsed at the level of the United Nations, the nature of the target changed from being policy-prescriptive to being largely symbolic. In this phase, the target became a disembedded object in global governance not linked to a shared agenda nor to coordinated and mutually binding mitigation efforts. The 2015 Paris Agreement marks the last stage in this development and may have further solidified the target as a disembedded object. In the final part of the paper, we suggest ways to overcome the current situation and to develop the 2°C target into a fully fledged global environmental governance target.

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Discursive stability meets climate instability: A critical exploration of the concept of ‘climate stabilization’ in contemporary climate policy

Cited by 47 publications

References 70 publications

Climate Sensitivity Distributions Dependence on the Possibility that Models Share Biases

Climate Sensitivity Distributions Dependence on the Possibility that Models Share Biases

Climate science and slow violence: A view from political geography and STS on mobilizing technoscientific ontologies of climate change

Governing the transformation towards ‘nature-inclusive’ agriculture: insights from the Netherlands

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