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This chapter focuses on the cultural response to environmental devastation. The debate about environmental devastation in the months preceding 9/11 were both the latest in a quarter century of discussions and a prelude to concerns that would ripen in the coming months. In the threat of global warming the fragility of life was evident in ways similar to that of nuclear annihilation and terrorism. Things were neither out of control nor fully under control, but perilously close to endangering all of humanity and thus a source of profound worry. The differences lay more in how immediate, unanticipated, or catastrophic the threat might be. Global warming would not obliterate the world in a sudden flash or wipe out large buildings in a vicious moment. If it was happening at all, as scientists largely agreed, it was a slow burn, like water in a kettle reaching the boiling point sooner than anyone realized. The cultural response to this sort of peril was thus in some ways unique, and yet in others, conditioned by the patterns of thought and relations of power that had become customary in the last third of the 20th century. Fear served both as an underlying current and as a force that could be manipulated. With no single event as pivotal as the bombing of Hiroshima or the attacks on 9/11, interpretations were less frequent, more scattered, and less subject to the agenda-setting influence of government. Yet the same inclination to transcend fear with action, to engage in individual and collective problem solving, was evident, and with it, the same emphasis on seeking technological solutions and debating administrative policies. The cultural response was shaped by the creative use of the imagination and focused decisively on questions of moral responsibility.

This chapter focuses on the complexity of putting climate change on the national agenda. Like the peril of nuclear weapons and the threat of terrorism, global warming was subject to numerous competing interpretations even among those who agreed it was serious. Facing up to the reality of humanity's impact on the environment brought forth proposals that inevitably reflected the nation's values and revealed the divisions in these values. The struggle showed leaders' continuing faith in science and technology, but also demonstrated wariness of the public about trusting scientists too much. In the short term, the process itself of debating an agenda served as the dominant cultural response.

Rates of warming during recent decades have exceeded those experienced during the previous millennia. This anthropogenic climate change has led to advances in organismal phenology, shifts in geographic ranges, and disruptions of ecological interactions. A growing body of evidence underscores the need to consider evolutionary responses to global warming. Both the physiological regulation of phenology and the thermal sensitivity of performance have evolved in warming environments. Nevertheless, quantitative genetic and allelic models suggest that rapid warming will lead to persistent maladaptation and certain extinction. The degree of maladaptation during warming depends on numerous factors, including the stochasticity of temperature, the size of the population, the additive genetic variance, the rate of gene flow, and the interactions between species. Further development of these models could lead to an applied theory of thermal adaptation that more accurately predicts the biological impacts of global warming.

This chapter presents some concluding remarks about the economic model presented in Chapters 8-11. Part II of the book studied the interrelation between anthropogenic global warming and economic growth assuming a simple descriptive model of endogenous growth. Using simulations, it was shown that increases in abatement spending may yield a win-win situation. That means a rise in abatement activities both reduces greenhouse gas emissions and raises economic growth. This holds for both the balanced growth rate and for the growth rate of GDP on the transition path.

Technical advances based on unprecedented levels of energy use brought a new phenomenon of mass consumption as well as many obvious gains in the typical quality of life. However, they have not substantially reduced economic inequality. They also introduced new risks (ranging from car accidents to nuclear weapons) and some worrisome environmental changes, especially the possibility of relatively rapid global warming.

Coping with harmful side‐effects of legitimate activities is a central aspect of moral responsibility in global interactions, epitomized in containment of climate harms due to greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter argues that ordinary values of trust and trusteeship that guide compatriots' responses to their interactions also make a model of fair teamwork the fundamental moral guide to coping with the process of global warming. Accounting for what is valid in demands for special concern for the poor, compensation for pollution and equal per capita emissions rights, this approach favors the regime with the impartially preferable allocation of climate burdens: burdens from unmitigated climate harms and from reduced economic opportunities due either to reduced emissions or to reduced access to the global atmospheric sink. The resulting standard of equity puts the brunt of emissions reductions on developed countries. The resulting standard of adequacy requires severe emissions cuts, posing significant risks of economic loss, to guard against risks of climate catastrophe.

Ecological citizenship is presented as an example and inflection of post‐cosmopolitan citizenship. It is contrasted with environmental citizenship. The ecological footprint is presented as the ecological citizenship's version of political space, and global warming is used to exemplify the asymmetrical relations of globalising cause‐and‐effect that call forth post‐cosmopolitan obligations.

Within geography, physical geography is concerned with the characteristics of the natural environment, the atmosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere; how they influence human activities and how they are affected by them across the face of the globe. It comprises geomorphology, climatology and biogeography, and proceeds by monitoring, modelling and managing environmental change. Geographical research at first concentrated on the direct impacts of glaciation on the geomorphology of Britain, such as the glacial erosion of northern Britain and its indirect impacts, especially the effects of changing sea levels. Physical geographers in the last 100 years have taken some comfort from the knowledge that their skills are applied in matters of public interest and importance. Now the pace of global environmental change is such that these skills will be essential in the next 100 years, in solving some of the great contemporary environmental problems such as global warming, the global disappearance of forests, desertification and water pollution.

This chapter describes scientific knowledge concerning greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the change in global average surface temperature. It considers the climate system of the Earth is in terms of its global energy balance using so-called energy balance models (EBM).

The polar regions have undergone major changes in configuration of land masses and climate over millions of years. However, it is the geologically brief period beginning around 120,000 years before present (BP), including a warm interglacial followed by the Würm glaciation and then the interglacial in which we now live, which is most relevant. This chapter discusses changes during geological time: the ice ages; biological responses to long-term changes; and present-day global climate change and polar regions.

Global warming and environmental destruction pose formidable social dilemmas. Although the contribution of each person to the problem through consumption, utilization, and waste is nearly invisible, the cumulative impact for the well-being of societies and individuals within those societies is potentially devastating. We propose that an important psychological factor contributing to the environmental commons dilemma is the motivation to justify and rationalize the status quo and the extant socioeconomic system. Rather than acknowledging and confronting environmental problems, we propose that people may engage in denial of environmental realities as a means of satisfying short-term needs associated with system justification. Denial, in turn, contributes to a failure to set pro-environmental goals and the tendency to perpetuate environmentally harmful behaviors that are detrimental in the long term. Four studies provided support for these predictions. People who exhibit chronically stronger (vs. weaker) tendencies to justify the system reported greater denial of environmental problems, less favorable attitudes toward the environment, and failure to set useful, ambitious goals or to engage in behaviors that would prevent further environmental deterioration. Differences in system justification tendencies helped to explain commonly observed differences in environmental attitudes and behaviors among liberals and conservatives, women and men, and those with more—compared to less—years of education. In addition, our experimental evidence suggested that engaging in denial of environmental realities serves a system-justifying function by re-establishing a view of the system as legitimate and just, but it interferes with setting goals to help the environment. Implications of a self-regulatory perspective on environmental attitudes and potential contributions of a social psychological analysis of commons dilemmas are discussed.

Religious campaigns related to climate change in the United States involve a variety of approaches. But not all religious efforts on the topic are aimed at increasing awareness of the threat of global warming; some are aimed at discrediting global warming by referring to it as a religion, a theology, or an object of belief. These voices do not just single out global warming to attack; rather, their approaches range from a rejection of most scientific theory (a result of creationism campaigns), to a dismissal of climate change as a creation of the left. On the surface, it appears like a battle between the claims of religion and science. Both sides, however, in fact want to make global warming a religious issue, and not just a scientific one. The “anti-global warming” forces want to make it so in order to undermine the authority of the science, and thus to discredit the existence of global warming, articularly insofar as it is human-caused. The “pro-global warming” activists want to make it a religious issue because they believe that basing any response on just the science is inadequate, for the issue is also about values. This chapter explores how each side frames the issue in terms of both religion and science. It argues that just examining responses to global warming in terms of religious views concerning science can be misleading. The faith-versus-science framing can hide perhaps the real framework involved: the belief in the economy and the market that influence the stances on both sides of the issue.