Human Choice and Climate Change, vols 1-4

Edited by:
  • Steve Rayner &
  • Elizabeth L. Malone
Battelle: 1998. 1,714pp $250, £150, (hbk); $100, £60 (pbk)

If the importance of climate change is related to the quantity of words that have been written about it, these volumes would suggest it is easily the most significant of contemporary environmental issues. Human Choice and Climate Change runs to four volumes and 1,400 pages of text, with chapters that stretch up to 80 pages and have well over 100 references each.

This ambitious project aims to present an alternative view of climate change to that provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — which, of course, has also been responsible for some weighty tomes. The questions underlying the IPCC approach may be characterized as: Is anthropogenic climate change occurring and how might it develop? What might be the impacts on ecosystems and human societies? How should human societies, and the international community, respond?

Human Choice and Climate Change, in contrast, starts with such questions as: How do scientists choose to study climate change and form a scientific consensus? How do people attribute blame for climate change and choose solutions? How are climate-change policy instruments chosen? Why and how did the international community choose to address climate change?

These questions make it clear that Human Choice and Climate Change treats the issue of climate change more as a social construction than as a natural-science phenomenon. Its authors occupy a spectrum of acceptance of what the IPCC natural scientists say about climate change. At the most sceptical end, one chapter by Michael Thompson and Steve Rayner refers to climate change as part of the “hegemonic myth” of “global vulnerability and fragility”. It suggests that a “potentially implausible hypothesis that human activities will warm the entire planet” has been picked up by the public because of “the lay propensity to attribute changes in weather patterns to human activity” rather than because of any scientific evidence.

At the other end of the spectrum is a chapter by Donald J. Wuebbles and Norman J. Rosenberg presenting the natural science of climate change very much as the IPCC does. Similarly positioned, another chapter assesses the possible impacts of climate change on land and water use, coastal zones and oceans, and on people, and discusses possible response strategies. Another explores how the world's energy systems have developed to their current state, how they might evolve, and the costs involved, as a result both of climate change and of attempts to mitigate it. Another discusses the possibilities, challenges and limitations of integrated assessment modelling. None of these chapters would be out of place in an IPCC report; they all make a useful contribution to knowledge about the issues.

In the last volume the editors try to pull together all the insights and present them in a form that would be useful to people who make policy. The final chapter is even called ‘Ten suggestions for policy-makers’, the project's equivalent to the IPCC's policy-makers' summaries.

One of the main points in this volume is the distinction drawn between two styles of social science: the descriptive paradigm that “analyzes social systems in terms of natural science metaphors” and the interpretive approach that “refers to the analysis of the values, meaning and motivation of human agents”. Human Choice and Climate Change contains good examples of both.

Rayner and Malone would like to see more research that seeks to integrate these two approaches, and would clearly recommend this as the basis for the climate-change research programme. Yet, on the evidence of these books, integration of the approaches is too strong an aspiration. The tensions and contradictions between them would make any such union chaotic. The descriptive approach depends on an acceptance of an objective reality that it is trying to describe. The interpretive approach sees the world much more in terms of social construction. Both may generate insights into the human condition. But each approach calls into question the other's fundamental axioms. The integration of such contrasting styles would be unlikely to be useful even if it were possible.

As for policy-makers, my hunch is that those few of them with the time to read these volumes will be more impressed by the descriptive than the interpretive chapters. The problem with the latter from a policy point of view is that they increase substantially the already formidable uncertainties connected with climate change.

The editors' ten recommendations do not advise policy-makers on how much to reduce emissions, or what policy instruments to use. Rather, they urge them to “view the issue holistically”, “recognise the limits of rational planning” and “employ the full range of analytic approaches and decision aids”. This might be good advice in a policy utopia, but the danger is that, in a second-best world, taking it too literally could bring policy-making to a complete halt. And if the IPCC has got its descriptive science right, that could be a most unfortunate result for the good intentions and high scholarship that have gone into this work.