Do humans have a responsibility to prevent climate change?

There is no doubt that climate change is happening but the problem seems to be the uncertainty to the extent that is actually happening.  The extent of possible circumstances is extraordinary with a sea rise level of 4 – 6 metres, additional desertification.  Some humans might respond in such a way that more study should be done; indeed climate change denial is an upcoming belief.  Climate change deniers believe that scientists are simply over evaluating the facts and generally not giving an unbiased evaluation of the scientific data available.  Although the results of climate change are uncertain however, they definitely cannot be avoided.  It is plainly immoral to wait for scientific certainty given the probability of widespread harm.  The United States is one of the biggest countries with a large proportion of the country debating over whether or not humans are actually causing climate change.  Tony Blair in 2005 attempted to urge George Bush to sign a climate change accord. At the World Economic Forum he said climate change was "not universally accepted", but evidence of its danger had been "clearly and persuasively advocated" by a very large number of "independent voices". Nevertheless this on going discussion and time delay will cause more suffering with those most at risk getting more affected day by day.  Clearly with the issue of climate change at high risk to others we should use the precautionary principle. When a movement creates a risk to others then we must take precautions to restrict the risks even if the cause and effect is not fully established.  If you had evidence that there was going to be a fire in your house, you would tell everyone in there to get out, even if the evidence wasn’t complete and you did not even know the origin, you would still make every effort to get everyone out of that house so that there was no harm done.  The result of a discussion held on December 2001 where the Royal Society held a two-day meeting to discuss the findings of the recently published Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was an almost unanimous recognition that human-induced climate change will have serious consequences but is potentially manageable providing that all countries and sectors are committed to adequate strategies for mitigation and adaptation.

Athanasiou and Baer put it quite clearly when they write that, "Even if we move quickly to cap the emission of greenhouse pollutants, the consequences of global warming will soon become quite severe, and even murderous, particularly for the poor and the vulnerable. And in the more likely case where we move slowly, the impacts will verge on catastrophic.”

Humans know that climate change exists so why do they not do anything to prevent this?  

Athanasiou and Baer also write “that in a world beset by ecological crisis, distributive justice must mean more than it did in the past. It must include not only the fair distribution of wealth, resources, and opportunities, but the air distribution of "impacts" as well.” They write on how rich countries should pay for the poor countries to help them out with climate change and help educate about the effects, which makes sense, each country should put in what they can and as all will benefit each country should definitely put in as much as they can relative to their funds and then all can equally reduce the climate change happening.  Because, according to Athanasiou and Bear again: “the elemental truth is that as the storms become more violent and the droughts more fierce, some of us will be hurt far, far more, and far earlier, than others.  The rich will be able to hide, but the poor will not, and neither will the plants and the beasts.....” which leads me to mention the duty of humans to animals and the environment.

A species of animal has a right to survive (without attempts from us to eradicate it), because every species removed from the Earth reduces the diversity of the whole system of life. The less diverse a biological system, the greater its susceptibility to collapse, which would not benefit us. Furthermore, other species have the potential to be of direct benefit to humans (for example, plants can be a source of medicine), a benefit we deny ourselves if we destroy them.  Locke wrote that in the state of nature no-one has liberty to destroy “any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it”.  A forest may be destroyed by a bushfire or flattened by elephants, and a human may be struck by lightning and killed, without contravening any “rights”. When we say “a human has a right to life”, we mean that no other human has the arbitrary right to kill him or her. When we say a forest has innate value, we suggest that humans have no right to destroy it. We may even mean that we have a duty to protect it, if it’s important enough to us.  A forest is important to us though, so we can continue living so how can we deny others of life?  

Climate change must be minimized, but at this point severe impacts are entirely inevitable.  The harm these impacts bring to the poor always the most vulnerable-must be minimized, and then alleviated, while the "burdens" of "adapting" to climate change must be honestly addressed, fairly distributed, and adequately funded.  Anything else would be unjust and lead inevitably to distrust, bitterness, and failure.”

There is some stigma around humans having the responsibility to prevent climate change.  These problems stem from scientific facts around climate change showing that humans may not be the route cause of climate change and therefore it is hard to see why they necessarily should have a specific responsibility to prevent it.  To believe that humans have caused climate change it is essential to believe that one of the following facts is indeed false.

1. Carbon dioxide, methane, and other gasses trap infrared radiation in the atmosphere, a process called the greenhouse effect.
2. Carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gasses have increased in the atmosphere by more than 35% in the last two hundred years.
3. This rise and the introduction of widespread burning of fossil fuels being simultaneous is not a coincidence -- burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gasses.
4. Throughout geological history, when greenhouse gas levels have risen at similar rates (due to various natural phenomena), temperatures have risen in response.
5. Throughout geological history, when temperatures have risen in response to rising levels of greenhouse gasses, catastrophic climate effects lasting centuries and millennia have resulted.
6. Since we have produced a large amount of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gasses in the last two hundred years, and similar levels of greenhouse gasses lead to rising temperatures, the rising temperatures we experience now are the result of our emission of greenhouse gasses; it is reasonable to predict that the trend will continue along historical lines.
7. Since historical rises in temperature in response to greenhouse gasses have produced long-lasting, catastrophic climactic effects, it is reasonable to predict that the current rises in temperature will do so as well.

Unfortunately to believe that one of these facts were false you would have to believe that all scientists were out to deceive us which is relatively unlikely.  However some scientists do believe that climate change is good for us and there is a certain aspect of truth from this point of view.  Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide emitted due to human consumption of fossil fuels can induce climate change and affect the conditions favourable to change a species composition. “Changes in precipitation that result from an increase in temperature will have a much greater effect on the ability of natural eco systems to produce than the increase in temperature itself.”  If some scientists believe that climate change is actually good for the environment then why should humans have a responsibility to change it?  If we look at Galileo Galilei a scientist who lived in the 16th century who as a professor of astronomy at a university in Pisa, he was required to teach the accepted theory of his time that the sun and all the planets revolved around the Earth. Later he was exposed to a new theory, proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus, that the Earth and all the other planets revolved around the sun. Galileo's observations with his new telescope convinced him of the truth of Copernicus's sun-centered or heliocentric theory.  His studies got him into trouble with the Roman Church and he was put under house arrest.  It turns out that this “radical scientist” as it were was actually correct in his findings; there are no reasons to suggest that these radical scientific thinkers may also be correct in the fact that climate change can be good for the environment and especially plant growth.

Another argument for why we should not be responsible for climate change is the belief that climate change is natural and it is occurring consistently and constantly.  However natural climate change has been overtaken by human induced climate change which is causing the majority of climate change we see nowadays is human induced which has over taken the natural climate change although even if today’s climate change was still natural it doesn’t help the fact that we are already feeling the disastrous impact of it.  Even if we are unclear about how much of the climate change is caused by humans and if people suggest as a result that as we don’t know anything we should not do anything then as we can feel and see the impacts of the changing climate we should do all we can to prevent it changing further even if this does mean money spent on more research.

It may also be noted that humans have a responsibility to themselves to stay alive and research to improve the human life which inevitably has meant an increase in technology and useful things around us.  If people are to attempt to prevent climate change by living in mud huts then the evolution of man was highly pointless.  Humans are inherently selfish and for that reason live in a world of “survival of the fittest”.  Imagine if the government took away your house, your clothes and your deodorant, how would you feel?  Most probably angry, annoyed, unclean and extremely cold.  This inevitably would not be fair and if we felt like that then we would almost certainly think that climate change “doesn’t matter” as a result and therefore we don’t have a responsibility to prevent it.

At the end of the day we have a choice. We can either continue on our flawed path in life, and in the coming decades risk disrupting the lives of millions of people including future generations, our own grand children, as their climate will be compulsorily changed around them. Or we can act now to address climate change and in taking on this challenge protect the fundamental rights of individuals and communities and avert the loss and damage of century’s old, diverse global cultures.  It is clear that most of the points against the responsibility to prevent climate change are flawed and at the end of the day we do have to consider the fact that it doesn’t matter if humans are causing it or not, we all have a responsibility to the environment to keep it there and we should all do what we can before it gets a great deal worse and we are all under water.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Climate Change, Climate Change2001,  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

http://www.climatechangenorth.ca/H1_Glossary.html, Yukon Conservation Society

Sir John Houghton, Climate change: what we know and what we need to know, royal soc, August 2002

Dale Jamieson, Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

David Adam, Oil firms fund climate change 'denial', the guardian, January 2005

Sir John Houghton, Climate change: what we know and what we need to know, royal soc, August 2002

Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer, Dead Heat: Global justice and Global Warming (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002),

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government. 1690,

Athanasiou and Baer, Dead Heat,

http://the-red-scare.blogspot.com/2007/12/climate-change-denial.html, The Red Scare, climate change denial, December 2007

Kellogg, W.W., Schware, R(1981) Climate change and society: consequences of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, West view press

---