Sorry, meant to send to whole list...

________________________________
From: Leon Sealey-Huggins
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2011 12:09 PM
To: Brian Orr
Subject: RE: The dangerous limits of dangerous limits

Dear Brian,

As I understand it, and I might be misreading it, the work is an  
attempt to concretely map the ways in which the instrumental focus on  
technique excludes value discussions from climate change debates. This  
is an extremely important exercise at a time where people are still  
insisting on focussing on other instrumental techniques, such as  
geoengineering, which do little to confront the problematic and  
unequal structuring of human societies. Indeed it is very similar  
logics which place faith in geoengineering as those which seek to  
establish a ‘safe’ limit to climate change.

So I think that one of the most important aspect of this kind of  
approach for looking at climate change is that it confronts the myopic  
focus on questions of science and technology at the expense of  
questions of values, politics and ethics.

Regards,

Leon
________________________________
From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum  
[[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brian Orr  
[[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2011 11:47 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The dangerous limits of dangerous limits

Dear Chris,

"I conclude that the two degree limit is a construct which makes  
possible an international environmental regime safe for the interests  
of elite actors."

Sounds like a nice academic exercise but there's a huge elephant in  
the ointment I'm afraid. I'm contending here, and many who know a lot  
more about these things have said as much, that the two degree limit  
is a chimera.

The race has been lost and the forces we have unleashed means that the  
process called climate change is now unstoppable, unless we seek to  
counter them by employing geoengineering techniques on an  
unprecedented scale - a task I would assert is very likely to be  
beyond the powers of the 'international community' to organise.

In a nutshell, we've pumped huge quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere  
which will be trapping the sun's radiation for hundreds of years ahead  
while we remain continuing to increase the rate of CO2 emissions  
(despite the best efforts of venture capitalists), the world's forests  
are either retreating or are being razed to the ground, the phyto  
plankton of the oceans are being crippled through acidification and  
the Arctic sea-ice is shrinking faster than man-kind has ever  
experienced.

There never has been or could be a 'safe' temperature for the globe.  
With heavy crossing of fingers we could have - theoretically -  
calculated a 'safe' level of CO2 accumulated emissions - and that  
could have been heavily influenced by concerns over whether the poor  
'should' be allowed to take a heavier toll than the rich. This was the  
debate which was won in the process of establishing the Kyoto protocol  
- but little good has it done anybody, unfortunately.

The two degree limit is a 'comfort blanket' for the 'elite actors'  
enabling them to deceive themselves that we can finesse our/their way  
around the virtual inevitability of the process we have had our backs  
behind ever since we learned to play with fire.

Brian Orr

On 9 Nov 2011, at 09:24, Christopher Shaw wrote:

Dear all

Mark has kindly invited me to share a very brief outline of my thesis  
with the list members, it being of some relevance to the issues  
discussed here. I think the best thing I can do is just post the  
abstract for the thesis, and if anyone is interested in further  
details I can email chapters/initial attempts at journal papers on to  
them. (I say, not as a boast but in support of my claims to the  
validity and quality of the thesis, that the examiners passed it  
without correction, and the external examiner Brian Wynne, probably  
the most respected scholar in the field of science and society  
studies, remarked it was as good as any piece of work he has examined).

Cheers

Chris

CHOOSING A DANGEROUS LIMIT FOR CLIMATE CHANGE: AN INVESTIGATION INTO  
HOW THE DECISION MAKING PROCESS IS CONSTRUCTED IN PUBLIC DISCOURSES


International climate change policy is predicated on the claim that  
climate change is a phenomenon with a single, global dangerous limit  
of two degrees of warming above the pre-industrial average. However,  
climate science does not provide sufficient empirical evidence to  
determine such an exact limit. In addition, a single limit incorrectly  
assumes that social and physical vulnerabilities to climate change are  
uniformly distributed in space and time. Public commentaries play an  
important role in shaping public engagement with an abstract concept  
such as climate change. This research project examines how public  
discourses construct the dangerous limits to climate change decision  
making process. My analysis draws on elite theory to argue that the  
two degree limit is a discourse which constructs climate change as a  
problem solvable within existing value systems and patterns of social  
activity. A comparison of primary and secondary data drawn from  
diverse sources is used to chart the key historical, social and  
cultural elements present in the construction and reproduction of the  
two degree dangerous limit discourse. The historical dimension of my  
analysis shows that public commentaries have ‘black boxed’ the genesis  
of the two degree dangerous limit idea. I demonstrate how claims of a  
consensus amongst elite policy and science actors are central to  
developing a dangerous limit ideology amongst influential public  
audiences. The two degree discourse elevates the idea of a single  
dangerous limit to the status of fact, and in so doing marginalises  
egalitarian and ecological perspectives. I conclude that the two  
degree limit is a construct which makes possible an international  
environmental regime safe for the interests of elite actors.