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Global Warming and Sociology Constance Lever-Tracy Current Sociology 2008; 56; 445 DOI: 10.1177/0011392107088238 The online version of this article can be found at: http://csi.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/56/3/445

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D I A LO G U E I I : O N G LO B A L WA R M I N G

Global Warming and Sociology Constance Lever-Tracy Flinders University of South Australia

CS abstract: Escalating climate change, partly induced by human activity, has made its way into public awareness, yet most sociologists, outside the specialism of environmental sociology, have had surprisingly little to say about the possible future social trajectories it may portend. Wary of accepting the truth claims of natural science, but aware of our own inability to judge the validity of their claims, we have generally preferred to look the other way, although these developments can affect the very core of our discipline’s concerns. We need a cooperative multidisciplinarity of social and natural scientists working together. keywords: climate change ✦ multidisciplinarity ✦ science ✦ sociology

Introduction During 2005, escalating climate change, at least partly induced by human activity, came dramatically closer, both to public awareness and to present or imminent experience. Evidence and warnings from respected natural scientific bodies featured almost daily in the media. Already there were reports of record breaking heat, droughts and hurricanes, melting ice, floods and rising sea levels that were destroying lives and livelihoods, spreading tropical diseases beyond their prior range, threatening the survival of many species and demonstrating the unreadiness of even the most powerful states. Disturbing findings of long-term studies were cited from peer-reviewed professional scientific journals.1 Yet most sociologists, outside the specialism of environmental sociology, have had surprisingly little to say about the possible future social trajectories they may portend. Wary of accepting the truth claims of natural science, but aware of our own inability to judge the validity of their claims, we have generally preferred to look the other way, although these developments can affect the very core of our discipline’s concerns. Current Sociology ✦ May 2008 ✦ Vol. 56(3): 445–466 © International Sociological Association SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) DOI: 10.1177/0011392107088238

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If any of the scenarios of probable serious effects or possible escalating feedbacks or runaway climate change materialize beyond a point of no return, then global society as a whole, its structure, culture and trajectory, will surely be completely changed, as will the nature and relations of states to society and to each other. Similarly, fundamental changes would result from any of a number of alternative responses to such a crisis. Evidence of a dramatic speeding up of the rate of change in natural processes has revolutionary implications for society and for sociology. The time lines of nature are now converging with those of society in a mutual lockstep, and the interacting evolution of both cannot be understood without the cooperative multidisciplinarity of social and natural scientists working together.

Scientists and Global Warming Twenty years ago, a conference on ‘The Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and of Other Greenhouse Gases on Climate Variations and Associated Impacts’ was held in Austria. It was attended by 89 scientists from 23 countries, participating as individuals, not representing governments or organizations. ‘Let off the leash, the researchers signed up to a forecast of “substantial warming” that was unambiguously “attributable to human activities”’ (Pearce, 2005b: 52–3). Climate scientists had been increasingly concerned since the 1970s, but this meeting generated a wider realization that significant change could come in our lifetime. In 1996, a survey of 100 international climate scientists found the majority believed that, although anthropogenic gases had not yet produced climate change, they could be expected to do so in future (Rosa and Dietz, 1998: 450). A ball had been set rolling that culminated in the Kyoto protocol. Over the 20 years that followed the Austrian conference, numerous reputable, peer-reviewed studies have contributed to establishing an almost complete scientific consensus about the reality, causation and seriousness of the threat, although with a range of possible scenarios. This culminated in July 2005, in a letter from the heads of 11 influential national science academies (of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the US), who wrote to the G8 leaders warning that global climate change was ‘a clear and increasing threat’ and that they must act immediately. They outlined strong and long-term evidence ‘from direct measurements of rising surface air temperatures and sub-surface ocean temperatures and from phenomena such as increases in average global sea levels, retreating glaciers and changes to many physical and biological systems’ (New Scientist, 2005b). 446


Lever-Tracy Global Warming and Sociology

It is true that the popular media often give equal time to others who have questioned the methodology of each study, stressing uncertainty and complexity. However, the same few ‘climate sceptics’ (often business economists2) appear repeatedly, and may be dubiously funded.3 Alternative explanations may be given for each of the findings and none will be immune to later correction. However, their diversity and cumulating mutual reinforcement, and the progressive resolution of anomalies, have left few climatologists with any serious doubts. The most powerful argument of the sceptics was that measurements from satellites and balloons in the lower troposphere indicated cooling, contradicting those from the surface and the upper troposphere. On 20 August 2005, New Scientist reported the publication in Science of the findings of three independent studies, described as ‘nails in the coffin’ of the sceptics’ case. These showed that the data that lay behind the anomaly were faulty. ‘The debate will linger. But there is [sic] no longer any data contradicting the predictions of global warming’, said one of these researchers (Merali, 2005: 10). The fact that scientists, rather than public or political discourse, first discovered and raised this as a political problem is unprecedented and ‘makes many of these concerns unique political issues and changes the role of scientific knowledge in policy and public discourse. . . . Science becomes the author of issues that dominate the political agenda and become the sources of political conflict’ (Stehr, 2001: 85). The scientific as well as the experiential evidence has come a long way since Stephen Yearley (1992: 521) wrote that the empirical fallibility, difficulties and ambiguities of scientific knowledge on global warming ‘means social problem claims founded on science offer hostages to fortune’. In 1992, the insurance bill for Hurricane Andrew broke all previous records and Cyclone Iniki was the strongest in more than a 100 years of Hawaiian records (Leggett, 2000: 103); 1995 was, at the time, an all-time record for reinsurance payouts for catastrophic losses (Leggett, 2000: 233). Just before the end of the century, American researchers released ice-thickness data, gathered by nuclear submarines, that the Pentagon had been sitting on for 10 years, which showed that over the previous 40 years the ice depth in all regions of the Arctic Ocean had declined by some 40 percent (Leggett, 2005: 322). The second report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in 1996, had predicted a maximum temperature rise of 3.5ºC. The third, in 2001, predicted a maximum rise of 5.8ºC (New Scientist, 2005c). The fourth report is due in 2007. In May 2001, 16 of the world’s national academies of science issued a statement on global warming, confirming that the IPCC should be seen as the world’s most reliable source of scientific information on the subject, endorsing its conclusions and stating that any doubts about them were ‘not justified’ (Leggett, 2005: 178). Thereafter, the evidence continued to 447



grow annually, eventually producing the aforementioned strong scientific consensus, but failing to dent the indifference of most sociologists. While sociologists may not be trained to evaluate the scientific evidence, they should know to be wary of the powerful corporate interests motivated to deny global warming, and respectful of the choice of ‘speaking truth to power’ that many scientists have now adopted.

The Events of 2005 The year 2005 began with the Tsunami disaster, which had no social causation but demonstrated human vulnerability in the face of nature. In its ‘News Review’ at the end of the year, New Scientist (2005f, 2005g) headlined ‘Global Warming Reaches a Tipping Point’ and ‘Hurricane Season Smashes Records’, noting that the 26 tropical storms and the three category 5 hurricanes were both a first for any season on record. Social responses to these disasters were mixed. The Tsunami had evoked significant global solidarity and the establishment of early warning systems. The response to Katrina was itself a disaster. The Kyoto protocol finally came into force (still unratified by the US) but greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise worldwide. In April, a team led by NASA’s James Hansen reported in the online journal Science Express on a 10-year oceanic study showing that the earth was holding on to more solar energy than it was emitting back into space. The institute’s director said ‘This energy imbalance is the “smoking gun” that we have been looking for’ (ABC TV News, 29 April 2005). Throughout the year, scientific reports multiplied. Even those scientists who had been warning of climate change for decades were appalled at the trend being revealed, suggesting previous calculations of the scale and imminence of danger needed another upward revision. While in 1995 few scientists believed the effects of global warming were already manifest, by 2005 few doubted it. Furthermore, an escalating runaway greenhouse effect, which had been considered highly improbable by most, was now being taken more seriously. On 19 August 2005, the Guardian Weekly front-page headline read ‘Warming Hits “Tipping Point”: Climate Change Alarm as Siberian Permafrost Melts for First Time since Ice Age’. Such a thaw, they wrote, could dramatically increase the rate of global warming by releasing billions of tons of previously trapped methane. In 1991, Jeremy Leggett had spoken of such melting tundra as part of a ‘worst case’ nightmare scenario (Leggett, 2000: 43). Four years earlier, the IPCC had predicted that Antarctica would not contribute significantly to sea level rise. The massive west Antarctic ice sheet was assumed to be stable. In June, a British Antarctic survey reported measurements 448



of the shrinking of glaciers on this ice sheet.4 In October, glaciologists reported that the edges of the Antarctic ice sheets were crumbling at an unprecedented rate and, in one area, glaciers were now discharging ice three times faster than a decade ago. If they disappeared completely, they could, on their own, raise sea levels worldwide by more than a metre.5 An eight-year European study, drilling Antarctic ice cores to measure their composition, reported that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere were now at least 30 percent higher than any time in the last 65,000 years. The speed of the rise was unprecedented, from 280 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial revolution to 380 today (SBS TV World News, 25/26 November 2005). On 20 January 2006, SBS TV World News also reported that a British Antarctic survey, analysing CO2 in crevasse ice in the peninsula, had found recent levels higher than any in the previous 800,000 years. Five yearly aerial photographs showed the ice cover on the Arctic Ocean also at a record low, with a loss of 50 km3 annually and a doubling in the speed of glacier retreat, to 12 km a year (Pearce, 2005a: 12). Temperate mussels were found in Arctic waters and Inuit and polar bears were shown cut off from their hunting grounds, as the ice bridges melted. In September, NASA doubled its estimates of melted fresh water flowing into the North Atlantic. The Gulf Stream, which warms the shores of Britain and Northern Europe, flows up from the Gulf of Mexico, carrying warm water into the North Atlantic. Descending cold water there fuels the ‘conveyor’, which carries a now colder stream back to the Gulf. In 2005, the water flow in the Gulf Stream was lower by 30 percent and the temperature in the Gulf of Mexico was the hottest on record. The ice melt had reduced the salinity of the stream in the North Atlantic, slowing the sinking of the water and thus the drive of the ‘conveyor’ (Pearce, 2005c). This might explain rising temperatures in the Gulf and increased hurricane ferocity. An Oxford University study indicated the Kalahari desert could double in size by the end of the century (SBS TV World News, 29 November 2005). Most Himalayan glaciers (95 percent in one estimate) were also reported to be shrinking, producing hundreds of new lakes in Bhutan and threatening future floods (SBS TV World News, 8 December 2005). Aerial photographs showed drought in the Amazon rainforest (Laurance, 2005). The first climate refugees were evacuated from the low-lying Pacific Carteret atolls (SBS TV World News, 7 December 2005). The trend continued in 2006. On 18 February, for example, SBS TV World News reported that NASA scientists have found the Greenland melt to be accelerating and discharging ice into the sea at twice the rate measured in the mid-1990s. Estimates that it would take 1000 years for the whole ice sheet to disappear now needed to be revised down. Other findings and arguments suggest underlying warming may even be masked and underestimated. The cyclical frequency of volcanic eruptions 449



has had an upward swing since 1960. Their greater aerosol emissions in the atmosphere would temporarily reflect some heat away from earth until the cycle turns downwards again (ABC Radio AM, 1 November 2005). Pollution emissions have a similar masking effect, which would decline if they were reduced. Global catastrophe may be relatively unlikely, but few scientists would now consider it inconceivable, especially if major Third World countries such as China, India or Indonesia achieve western emissions levels, or if the Amazon rainforest is destroyed or positive feedbacks cascade unpredictably. While most models now project a maximum warming of between 5 and 6ºC by the end of the century, some new scenarios suggest much worse if feedback loops are triggered (Leggett, 2005: 118–21). The scientific consensus called for urgent action. By the end of 2005, the predictions at the more alarmist end of the spectrum had gained credibility. The Montreal meeting of 189 countries in December 2005 and the AP6 meeting in Sydney in January 20066 were warned that with a rise of over 2ºC (over pre-industrial levels) ‘inevitable’ if CO2 concentrations passed 400 ppm, ‘the risks of abrupt, accelerated or runaway climate change increase’ (Leggett, 2005: 116, 283). At current escalating rates of emissions, the concentration would reach 700 ppm by the end of the century. In fact, emissions needed to be cut by half by mid-century. The world had less than 10 more years, on its current global emissions trajectory, before a point of no return would be passed, and the possibility of stabilizing concentrations would be lost.7 Some, such as James Lovelock and Tim Flannery (Tadros, 2006), have warned of a potential collapse of global food production and of possible sea rises of 7 m, inundating most coastal cities, whereby billions could die.

Sociology and Global Warming The Strange Silence of Mainstream Sociology The dangers that scientists have been warning about pose major threats to society or call for a rapid, total reorientation of its most important activities, structures and values. Yet mainstream sociology and its major journals continue to be oblivious of this elephant in the room. During the 1990s, the question of global warming was sometimes raised in the context of an interest in new social movements, media discourses and measurements of public attitudes to various kinds of risk (Dunlap, 1998; Mazur, 1998). In 1998, in International Sociology, Rosa and Dietz published an excellent discussion of climate change and society and of the sociological issues involved, and in 2001, a special edition of Current Sociology was devoted to environmental issues with some, generally tangential, references to global warming. Only Stehr’s article in this issue devotes serious theoretical attention 450



to global warming, arguing that economy and ecology do contradict in this case, but that a contingent change of direction to dematerialization of the economy might, coincidentally, resolve the danger (Stehr, 2001). In the same issue, Wilkinson (2001) continued earlier discussions on risk perception and panic as did Ungar (2001) in the British Journal of Sociology. Thereafter, an almost total silence descended, reflecting, it seemed, a mood of ‘been there, done that!’. Sutton (2004: 1) notes that many standard sociological texts still had no chapter on the environment (e.g. Haralambos and Holborn, 2004), while Giddens’ 2000 edition of Sociology devoted to the subject only four out of 625 pages. In the 2001 edition, a rather longer chapter did appear. I conducted a web search for the words ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’ or ‘greenhouse gas’ in articles in eight major Anglophone, mainstream sociology journals (Acta Sociologica, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Current Sociology, International Sociology, Journal of Sociology and Sociology) as well as the influential Marxist journal New Left Review, from January 2000 to mid2005. There was not a single finding in titles or abstracts, not one article focused on the subject. There were 29 examples in a whole text search of articles,8 of which only seven appeared after January 2003, and in most of these the terms featured, without comment, in a list of assorted, generally unrelated environmental issues. Stephen Crooke’s presidential address to the Australian Sociological Association (TASA) in 2000 had contained a call to re-engage with the substantive knowledge of the natural sciences: ‘The relations between natural, technical and social processes lies at the heart of fundamental issues from climate change to genetic engineering . . . we must place the same issues at the top of our agendas’ (Crooke, 2003: 11). There is little evidence this call was heeded, and Pakulski and Trantor’s (2004) eulogy on Crooke’s death included no reference to such multidisciplinarity nor to his belief that sociologists should become familiar with debates in the sciences and ‘more comfortable with the culture of the natural sciences generally’ (Crooke, 2003: 11). In the core Marxist journal New Left Review, the concerns of eco-Marxists have been similarly ignored (with no mention of global warming in the text of any article this century). Giovanni Arrighi, in two major articles in 2005, traced the history of capitalism through a longue durée of four systemic cycles of overaccumulation, with shifting hegemony between rising and declining political powers and capitalist sectors (Arrighi, 2005a, 2005b). Now that globalization had incorporated the whole world into capitalist production chains and global markets, there were no longer any new spaces to absorb the surplus. Throughout, he never once mentions any environmental problems, nor the possibility (canvassed by some ecoMarxists) that tackling global warming, through massive investment in 451



sustainable development and new energy forms, might be the frontier for a new period of accumulation.

Why this Silence? There is a mystery in this lack of interest in developments that could conceivably open the door to chaos and barbarism later this century, or whose prevention might require a transformation in the core processes of industrial society. A contingent reason for the silence may lie in the status structure of the discipline. Writers on the subject often come from the field of environmental sociology, originating in rural sociology. Given the classical focus on urbanization, rural sociology has tended to be marginalized from prestigious journals or degree courses. There are, however, more essential reasons for the silence. Arguably, it derives from the interaction of two factors. The first is our recently acquired suspicion of teleology and our mirroring of an indifference we find in contemporary society towards the future. The second factor is our continuing foundational suspicion of naturalistic explanations for social facts, which has often led us to question or ignore the authority of natural scientists, even in their own field of study. Together, these two have often blinded us to the predicted, fateful convergence of social and natural time, in a new teleological countdown to possible disaster, coming towards us from the future. While the rate of change of natural processes is shrinking towards the time scales of human society, social scientists have been theorizing a further shrinking in cultural horizons, with an emphasis on immediate gratification, and a decline in long-term direction or plans, so that even threats just decades away would now scarcely register. In his history of the 20th century, Eric Hobsbawm complained how men and women, at the century’s end, live in a ‘permanent present’ where a discounting of the past parallels inattention to the future. The editors of What the Future Holds: Insights from Social Science, note in their introduction the sharp decline, since 1980, of academic discussions on future scenarios (Cooper and Layard, 2002: 4). For those of us brought up on C. Wright Mills, historical grand narratives have seemed to be at the very foundation of our discipline, yet no sociologist contributed to this volume. To grasp this, we can contrast the classic sociological paradigms of modern society with ours. Marx and Weber were motivated to understand both the origins and the distinctive nature of modern, capitalist, industrial, urban society, and its future shape and likely trajectory. Marx expected contradictions in the society to work themselves out dialectically, through polarizing class conflict leading either to barbarism or an era of freedom and plenty, while Weber, more pessimistically, foresaw a linear trajectory, with the uninterrupted advance of the calculating, depersonalized ‘cosmos 452



of the modern economic order . . . bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals. . . . Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilised coal is burnt’ (Weber, 1930: 181). Neither, however, expected any major interruption to strike suddenly from outside society. Sociologists have more recently sought to describe and understand a new social reality, resulting from the dissolution of these expectations, and have come to reject any long-term future orientation as ‘teleology’. We have no expectation now of socialist transformation, while both the progressive polarization of a collectively organized working class and an increasingly concentrated capital has been reversed. The iron cage and the onward march of rationality and bureaucracy have also been countered. In their place we see a rise in entrepreneurial small businesses and religious fundamentalisms and in mantras of competition, individualism and flexibility. This foreshortening of time horizons has often been made central to sociological theorizing in the late 20th century. Giddens saw the ‘dissolution of evolutionism’ and the ‘disappearance of teleology’ as two of the most conspicuous features of his new stage of reflexive, radicalized modernity (Giddens, 1990: 52). Lash and Urry (1987) described and theorized a transition, taking place from the 1970s, from ‘organized’ to ‘disorganized’ capitalism. As deregulation and globalization ratcheted up competition, the capacity of corporations, unions and governments to coordinate the national economy and society was undermined. Short-term, ‘flexible’ responsiveness replaced long-term planning. The French regulation school spoke of a transition from a Fordist to a flexible, post-Fordist regime of accumulation. In Britain, Harvey wrote in 1989 of the new wave of ‘space–time compression’, in which a crisis of profitability was overcome by accelerating the turnover time of capital and technology. The half-life of a Fordist product, of five to seven years, was cut by half or more, and ‘the postmodern aesthetic celebrated difference, spectacle, ephemerality and fashion’ (Harvey, 1989: 156). ‘The temporary contract in everything is the hallmark of postmodern living’ (Harvey, 1989: 291). The dominance of stock options and share turnover has increasingly subjected investment decisions everywhere to a very short-term profit motive.9 Japanese capitalism, distinctively and, for a time, successfully based on corporate planning, made possible by reinvested profits, managerial power and lifetime employment, entered a long period of stagnation after 1991, undermining its relevance as an alternative model. The collapse of communism similarly removed another such alternative. Baumann (1988) extended the idea of postmodernity from culture to society. He described postmodern art as the paradigm of postmodern culture and of a postmodern world view that rejected historical thinking, and cited Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome: ‘that peculiar rootstock 453



which . . . seems to possess no sense of privileged direction, expanding instead sideways, upwards and backwards with the same frequency’ (Baumann, 1988: 791). However, he warned against a ‘postmodern sociology’ that would itself take on these attributes, advocating instead a ‘sociology of postmodernity’. This could study postmodernity as ‘a fully fledged comprehensive and viable type of social system’, a historical stage in which consumer freedom had been substituted for work ‘as the hub around which the life world rotates. . . . Having won the struggle for control over production . . . capitalism can now afford the free reign of the pleasure principle’ (Baumann, 1988: 808). It should not, we can add, pre-empt an awareness that a later stage might replace this rhizome-like postmodern social system by a countdown to a natural catastrophe. Where do such changes lead us? Is there life after information/ consumer/post whatever society? Too often, one suspects, Baumann’s warning has not been heeded, and sociology has taken on some of the colouration of its subject matter. Without admitting it, many sociologists have acted as if Lyotard’s postmodern evaporation of the historical ‘grand narratives’ or Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ were in fact upon us, as suitable guides to our own practice. Sociologists have thus described at length how contemporary society has turned its eyes away from the future, its people focusing on immediate consumption and ephemeral fashions, its politicians on the next election and its industrial leaders on the next annual report. To take global warming seriously involves asking the kinds of questions about future directions that most sociologists believe they have now put behind them. Preoccupied with analysing these ‘social facts’, sociologists are unwilling to be disturbed by the voices of natural scientists, reporting from inaccessible upper atmospheres, ancient ice cores or deep oceans, where no social facts exist. Unable themselves to judge the validity of the evidence, and increasingly uncomfortable with predictions and teleologies, they prefer to avoid the subject. For the classics (Marx, Weber, Durkheim), as for most sociologists since, nature, for practical purposes, was an unproblematic, stable background constant, increasingly understood and controlled by science and technology. The role of sociology was to study social processes, trends and contradictions independently from the natural sciences. Such an insulation of society from nature has, indeed, become a major subject of debate between realists and social constructivists within environmental sociology, since Catton and Dunlap first counterposed their ‘New Ecological Paradigm’ to what they called the ‘Human Exemptionalist Paradigm’ in the late 1970s (Dunlap, 2002; Yearley, 2002). Since then, environmental sociologists have worked out an accommodation, enabling them to take seriously the findings of natural scientists. See, for example, Mol and Spaagaren’s (2000: 27) claim that ‘What is conceived of as 454



“social” . . . cannot be explained without reference to the natural.’ Mainstream sociologists, on the other hand, have remained much closer to the social constructivist paradigm of nature. At best a middle road could be claimed for the idea that science and society are ‘partially independent levels’, but this led to the same conclusion as constructivism: that knowledge of science is rarely relevant for sociologists (Lidskog, 2001). Such a ‘partial independence’ of the levels is, however, dramatically called into question by the time convergence that has become manifest in the last decades. Social processes that impact on nature in unintended ways, such as emissions caused by economic growth and the destruction of carbon sink forests, have been speeding up exponentially since the industrial revolution. The result has been an unexpected and unprecedented speeding up also of changes in natural processes. Natural change is usually very slow. It used to be believed, for example, that it would take 10,000 years to melt an ice sheet,10 but we can no longer assume that, for practical purposes, changes in natural processes are not relevant to social analysis. Global climate changes are now likely to impact within our own lives or those of our children. The urgency for remedial action is now measured in decades, not able to be postponed to some indefinite future. But even decades have now receded out of sight. The fact that macro theorists of late 20th century society, from Daniel Bell to Ulrich Beck, continue to see nature as either irrelevant or as socially controlled or even constructed, contributes to sociology’s marginal contribution to the discussions about global warming. In this case, where the concepts and the evidence have been entirely the product of natural scientists, and beyond the expertise of social scientists to evaluate, the latter have found themselves on uncomfortable ground and have tended to shy away. Daniel Bell, in his influential Post Industrial Society, proposed a threepart schema, comprising pre-industrial (or traditional), industrial and post-industrial stages. The third would be based on information technology, rather than on the use of energy and raw materials, and on the displacement of the secondary, manufacturing sector by what we now call ‘services’. In his schema, the ‘game against nature’ was relegated to the ‘pre-industrial stage’ (with no hint that it might return), and the ‘game against fabricated nature’ of the industrial stage was now also about to be displaced by the post-industrial ‘game between persons’ (Bell, 1974: 117). Others later added theories of ‘information society’ and of ‘dematerialized production’ (Stehr, 2001: 77) to the concept of a post-industrial society – often ignoring the fact that energy-intensive material production has been globalized rather than displaced, and continues to grow absolutely despite large increases in efficiency. Giddens has been dismissive of the relevance of direct studies of natural ‘facts’, remarking that ‘Although ecology seems to be wholly about “nature”, 455



nature in the end has very little to do with it’ (Giddens, 1994: 189). Perhaps for this reason, he has written little about global warming: it is not mentioned in his book on Reflexive Modernization (Beck et al., 1994) or in his introduction to the more recent A Progressive Manifesto (Giddens, 2003). In Beyond Left and Right (Giddens, 1994), he did include global warming in his list of the ‘high consequence, manufactured risks’ of reflexive modernity, but devoted to it only a few lines (Giddens, 1994: 3–4, 203). He understood such ‘manufactured risks’ as essentially a product of human intervention (Giddens, 1994: 3–4, 203, 206–7) rather than (as this article argues) resulting from an, only partly understood, interaction of social and natural systems each with their own dynamic, and therefore requiring both social and natural expertise. He argued global warming was ‘not undisputed’, and rather than referring to the collective conclusions of most climatologists since 1988, or the IPCC report of 1990 (expressing the views of 700 specialist scientists) or that of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, he preferred to cite Deepak Lal, the neoliberal economist, from his 1990 Wincott Memorial Lecture for the Institute of Economic Affairs. ‘According to Lal,’ wrote Giddens, ‘the evidence about global warming is ambiguous and scientists disagree about its interpretation. Depending on which scientist is consulted, “we could frizzle or we could freeze or there may be no change”’ (Giddens, 1994: 203);11 easier then to ignore them all. Ulrich Beck’s concept of ‘Risk Society’ is the only grand social theory with a major explicit focus on the interface of society and nature, but on closer examination it too proves inappropriate to the question of climate change. In fact, Beck does not discuss the application of his concept to the greenhouse effect, but concentrates instead on such issues as toxicity, nuclear hazards or genetic engineering, and this is not surprising given how inappropriate his analysis is for the former purpose.12 Beck claims that ‘risks’ are products of today’s new stage of ‘high industrialism’ and its advanced ‘science/technology’ (he rarely distinguishes the two), which often seem to be his primary enemy. But global warming does not fit, being a long-term cumulative effect, finally manifest, of the whole history of modern society. The worst impact on climate comes not from advanced technology but from the burning of fossil fuels by basic industrial production. ‘The source of danger is no longer ignorance but knowledge’, Beck (1992: 183) argues. One could counter that it is our ignorance of the risks that allowed them to accumulate. His solution to risk is often to attack the ‘dominance’ of science/technology and to seek its subjection to common experience and democratic control (e.g. Beck, 1992: 223, 1995: 46). Beck usually hedges his bets, but in one exceptionally constructionist moment, admitted he was mainly interested in cultural perceptions and definitions of risk, not in their reality. Indeed, he suggested that they ceased to count as ‘risks’ once they had became manifest (Beck, 2000: 213). Whatever his intention, this would conveniently absolve sociologists from 456



having an opinion on the validity and implications of scientists’ factual findings. Unfortunately, this would leave sociology as an agnostic on the sidelines, continually withdrawing its concern about crucial issues dividing society, just as they become salient. But global warming has been revealed by scientific studies of ice cores, ocean depths and stratospheres, beyond the range of daily experience. In fact, we do desperately need more and better knowledge of this kind, and to protect the professional autonomy of natural scientists, under threat from capitalist interests and religious fundamentalists, well equipped to lobby democratic institutions.13 The anti-science arguments of such neoliberals as Deepak Lal (motivated by a dogmatic opposition to any kind of government intervention) have not only been taken up by the paid sceptics of the fossil fuel lobby, but have also thus evoked an echo in the prejudices of sociologists, who should be more careful of the company they keep. In contrast, it seems to me that a respectful division of labour is essential now that natural and social change are operating in tandem, on the same time scales. Since we are not ourselves competent to evaluate the debate between climatologists and sceptics, we have no option but to accept the professional authority and integrity of the accredited experts, on questions of natural processes, as a basis for our own analyses of social causes, consequences and choices. The alternative is irrelevance or worse – an effective complicity with the vested interests of fossil fuel corporations. I recently read Jared Diamond’s (2005) fascinating book Collapse: How Some Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, surely an ideal starting point for a sociological debate and research programme about how an approaching ecological crisis could impact on society, and about the possibilities, likely agents and implications of alternative responses. With a broad brush, he compares and draws lessons from the failure of some past societies (including Greenland, Easter Island and Haiti) to reverse their catastrophic relationship with nature, while others (including Tokugawa, Japan and Dominica) were able to pull back from the brink by a range of measures. How sad for our discipline that it was written by an ornithologist rather than a sociologist!

Environmental Sociology and Global Warming This article has aimed to explore the reasons for the exclusion of the subject from the mainstream and has had neither the purpose nor the space to survey and evaluate the recent contributions of environmental sociologists. Even here, a focus on the macro implications of climate change has taken time to appear. The papers presented at the 1998 conference on ‘Sociological Theory and Natural Ecology’ (Dunlap et al., 2002), for example, under the auspices of ISA RC4, are interesting and relevant, but climate change itself is rarely the centre of their attention. 457



Undoubtedly, much good work has been done in the last few years, although rarely published or even referred to in articles in the major journals. For example, McCright and Dunlap (2002), Rosewarne (2003) and Soron (2004) have analysed the impact on Kyoto negotiations of the strategies, interests and discourses of sceptics, opponents and supporters; Fisher (2004) has explored the modalities of national governance and the global climate change regime; Gow and Leahy (2005) and Norgaard (2006) have updated and developed work on public reactions to the risks of climate change; Martinez-Alier (2002) and Bachram (2004) have written critiques of carbon trading and carbon sink arrangements; York et al (2003) have sought to assess the anthropogenic sources of climate change in different countries; Redclift and Sage (1998) have focused on the likely impact of climate change and responses to it on global inequality, as does Timmons Roberts in his A Climate of Injustice (Roberts, 2006). Within the subdiscipline of environmental sociology, two schools in particular have emerged, seeking to ‘find out how and why human populations . . . come to cause these environmental effects and how these effects are fed back into the human and societal condition’, and to ask how a modern/capitalist society might respond. Both periodically include questions of climate change in their analyses. The Ecological Modernization school,14 originating in the Netherlands and Germany, was influenced by Huber’s argument in the 1980s that a green capitalism was both possible and desirable (Mol and Spaargaren, 2000: 22). It has sought to document, with an open mind, how far and how ‘production processes are increasingly constructed using ecological criteria’ (Mol and Sonnenfeld, 2000: 4), seeing ‘capitalism neither as an essential precondition nor as the key obstruction to stringent or radical environmental reform’ (Mol and Spaargaren, 2000: 23). The second school is that of Eco-Marxism, which has sought to revise Marx’s theory to overcome his ‘productivism’.15 In its place they include what James O’Connor had called ‘the second contradiction of capitalism’, between the (ever expanding) forces and the (necessarily finite, natural) conditions of production, with the tendency of the former to destroy the latter (Buttel et al., 2002: 7–8). In contrast with radical ecologists, both schools see themselves as humanists, concerned primarily for the welfare of society and accepting the need for scientific knowledge and the reality and constraints imposed by external nature.16 In general, the two schools disagree about the chances of modern/capitalist society avoiding catastrophe, but on this there are overlaps and internal divisions. While the modernizers are generally optimistic (Yearley, 2002), they do see successes as contingent and reversible. Most eco-Marxists believe that sustainable capitalism is not possible, since it is bound to the ‘treadmill of production’ 458



and ‘must grow or die’; but some suggest that by commodifying nature and turning it into a store of capital to be managed, ‘Environmental crisis has given liberal capitalist society a new lease on life’ (O’Connor, 1994: 125) with new opportunities for legitimation, growth and profit, and that this might be a possible response to the threat of climate change (Boucher et al., 2003; Rosewarne, 2003).17 Although the two schools have debated with each other and have had ambitions to ‘contribute to general sociological theory’, their wider impact in the discipline has been limited (Huber, 2001: 10). Rosa and Dietz’s (1998) and Stehr’s (2001) overviews of sociological debates on environmental issues in International Sociology and Current Sociology do not cite any of them, nor do Arrighi’s (2005a, 2005b) major theoretical articles on the current crisis of capitalist accumulation. Environmental social science has developed into a full fledged subdiscipline of sociology but clearly its impact is still marginalized.

Conclusion: Questions for Sociology The year 2005 was also a social ‘tipping point’, with global warming perhaps irreversibly on the public agenda. Although emissions continue to rise, with Kyoto’s limited targets unmet, the old debates on the existence or seriousness of anthropogenic causes of global warming appear to be effectively over. The voices of scientists are regularly penetrating the media, saying we would need to start now on a path that would cut emissions by 50 percent or more by mid-century, if we are to avoid possible escalating feedback effects (Hogan, 2005; Leggett, 2005: 161, 283). Al Gore’s film on global warming is breaking box office records for a documentary. George Bush and John Howard have ceased their denial, and become partisans of carbon sequestration and nuclear power. Business, politicians and environmentalists are now internally split in novel ways between advocates of reduced consumption, of efficiency and of a range of alternative energy sources, including gas, solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, biomass, geothermal, carbon sequestration, etc. The advocates of each accuse the others of grandstanding without serious intent, or of ignoring costs, needed time scales and technical feasibility or the negative impacts and dangers for society or the environment Most sociologists have not yet taken stock of these changes. We have already wasted too much time, and may awaken too late to have any impact. It is now essential that the discipline as a whole reorients itself, to overcome the two inhibitions described earlier – the old one against listening seriously to what scientists say about nature and the more recent one against thinking about the future. Twenty years ago, Piore and Sabel (1984) proposed that society periodically came to a crossroads indicating alternative technological futures, but a direction once chosen would become increasingly hard to reverse. 459



Past turning points have included the development of steam power, the internal combustion engine, microelectronics and information and communications technology. The choice of which technology to develop, and especially of how and by whom, has shaped not just the physical and economic but also the social, political and cultural world. The decision of how much, how and by whom global warming should be confronted is perhaps the biggest of such moments of choice. The first choice will be about priority and resources. If this is too little, too late, we will face growing dangers and probable economic and political breakdowns. If amplifying feedback loops are triggered, improbable catastrophes become more likely. The Gulf Stream flow could be halted, freezing Britain and Northern Europe. Droughts could wipe out the agriculture of hundreds of millions in Africa and Australia and in Bangladesh and China, where they depend on Himalayan melt water and monsoon rains. Will this accentuate global inequality or produce new winners and losers? Will it bring the world together, as in responses to the Tsunami, or will it provoke closing borders, xenophobia and national or communal conflict? How well will different societies be prepared? Can we avoid repeating the discriminatory and incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina? If effective action is chosen, it will have to be on a massive scale, involving a rapid retooling of production and distribution systems, particularly agriculture, energy, transport and urban structure. Will this be achieved by a market-based regime (requiring huge public subsidies) or by a shift to a national or a global regulatory regime? What agents would have the power and interest to achieve each of these outcomes? Who would benefit and who would lose from such changes? What impact would such a shift of resources, from consumption to investment in producer goods, have on industrial structure, skills and above all on culture? Is it likely, for example, that the practices and values of free markets, individualism, diversity and choice will not be significantly modified? Other questions are posed by the measure or mix of measures chosen. Would a strategy of reducing or halting economic growth or consumption require draconian enforcement? Which kind of alternative energy development could be effective in time and at a realistic cost? How would the choice of alternative affect centralization or decentralization of economic and political power? Tackling all these questions requires the cooperation of social and natural science and for awareness of the issue to penetrate all branches of sociology and be incorporated into their research.

Notes 1. Much of the scientific information in this article is drawn from reports in New Scientist, a well-respected 50-year-old popularizing scientific weekly, run by

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2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

what it claims is ‘probably the world’s largest network of science and technology journalists’ (New Scientist, 2005a). These reports are mainly simplifications, for non-scientists and scientists from different disciplines, of refereed articles in professional scientific journals and of papers for scientific conferences. I have treated these as reliable sources, remembering that some complexities and reservations may have been elided. Only thus can a sociologist access such material. A 1994 survey found mainstream economists expressed less anxiety, by a factor of 20, about economic and environmental consequences of climate change than did natural scientists (Schneider, 2002: 147). Leggett (2000) documents in detail, throughout the book, the activities of fossil fuel lobbies such as the Global Climate Coalition and the Global Climate Council. The findings, presented to a major conference of climatologists in Exeter, UK were reported in New Scientist (2005d). The findings, presented to a conference of glaciologists meeting at the Royal Society in London, were reported in New Scientist (2005e). At Montreal, the Kyoto protocol finally came into force. ‘AP6’ is the short name for the Asia–Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, including China, the US, Australia, Japan, South Korea and Canada. Although set up by the US as a ‘voluntary’ alternative to the mandatory policies of the Kyoto protocol, all its members, except for the US and Australia, are also signatories of the protocol. Leggett is citing an article in The Independent newspaper describing the report of a taskforce including the UK Institute for Public Policy Research, the US Center for American Progress and the Australia Institute and the chair of the IPCC (Leggett, 2005: 113–16). British Journal of Sociology is not included as a whole text search function was not available for the journal. Leggett describes an expectation of planning horizons of less than five years among Shell executives he met (Leggett, 2000: 54). Recent evidence from two-mile ice cores from Greenland indicates there have been a few past episodes of devastating climate jolts, triggered perhaps by volcanoes, asteroid strikes or sun wobbles (SBS TV, 2005). The recent speed up is, however, exceptional and has no such explanation. Giddens, rather naively, attributed all the disagreements among scientists to the irreducible complexity of their subject matter. Leggett (2000), a natural scientist by training, has managed to produce a far more ‘sociological’ account of the role of corporate power and interests in promoting scepticism. In risk society writings, as with Giddens, global warming sometimes features on lists of environmental hazards, but is nowhere addressed directly. See, for example, McCright and Dunlap (2002), Monbiot (2005) and Leggett’s (2000) Carbon War, which describes corporate lobbying at climate conferences. ABC TV (2006) reported interviews with various insiders about the influence on government of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network (bringing together the coal, electricity, aluminium, petroleum and cement industries). Current and past senior government scientists alleged censorship of their public statements. A special edition of Geoforum (2000: 31) contains an overview and examples of their work; see also Mol and Sonnenfeld (2000) and Mol (2001).

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Current Sociology Vol. 56 No. 3 15. See, for example, the various contributions in O’Connor (1994) and more recently the journals Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and Journal of Critical Realism. 16. Duarte (2001) attacks them both from an ecocentric position. 17. They cite Blair Sandler’s argument that what needs to grow is not material output but exchange value, which could equally come from non-material sources or from developing alternative energy.

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Biographical Note: Constance Lever-Tracy has taught sociology at Enfield in the UK, Hong Kong, China, and in Australia in Melbourne and Brisbane, and is currently a senior lecturer at Flinders University in Adelaide. She has come only recently to an interest in global warming (for the same reasons as are explored in this article). Previously, her research focused on immigration and industrial militancy, altruism and reciprocity; on hours of work; and on Chinese diasporic businesses in Australia, Asia and China. Books she has co-authored include A Divided Working Class? Ethnic Segmentation and Industrial Conflict in Australia (with Michael Quinlan; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), The Chinese Diaspora and Mainland China: A New Economic Synergy (with David Ip and Noel Tracy; Macmillan, 1996) and Chinese Business and the Asian Crisis (with David Ip and

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Current Sociology Vol. 56 No. 3 Noel Tracy; Gower, 2000), as well as writing some 30 journal articles on a range of subjects. She edits a weekly webpage http://climatechange.flinders.edu.au. Address: Department of Sociology, Flinders University of South Australia, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia. [email: [email protected]]

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