I open the book with the political struggle that took place between parties at COP24, over whether the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C should be noted or welcomed. This provides the context for exploring the IPCC as a central site in and producer of climate politics. In the chapter, I take the reader back to where this study began, with the question, who has the power to define climate change for collective response and what constitutes this power? The answer the book offers is the practice of writing. The actors, activities and forms of authority framework provides the analytical framework for exploring the asymmetries in power to effect how climate change is written. This approach has developed from interviews, observation and extensive data collection from IPCC documentation. The resulting book takes the reader on a journey into the intricate details of writing an assessment, the social order through which it is written and how climate change is known and acted upon through the process.

This chapter sets out to identify key conceptual resources available for exploring power in the social construction of global environmental degradation for collective response. The chapter begins with the epistemic community model, which illuminates the role that transnational communities of scientists have in identifying issues like climate change and informing political action. This approach has been important for documenting the origins and establishment of the IPCC in 1988. However, empirical accounts informed by discursive and normative frameworks in other issue areas challenge the centrality of scientists in treaty formation. The studies reviewed identify the emergence of environmental issues as the source of new institutions; however, they also highlight how problem diagnosis has to converge with prevailing political and economic orders. Revisiting the IPCC’s emergence through the idiom of co-production at the end of the chapter, reveals how climate change had to be transformed into a global problem to fit with the existing remit of international organisation.

The aim of this chapter is to reconceptualise climate politics as a struggle to name the problem and thereby determine how it is known and acted upon. I suggest that underpinning the visible elements of contestation over the reality of climate change, who is responsible and by how much, is a struggle over order – the distribution of economic, social and political resources and the values that organise it as such. Describing the politics of climate change as a field of activity orientated around determining the meaning of the problem enables me to situate the IPCC centrally within this struggle as the key site in producing international assessments of the issue. The IPCC’s role in establishing collective interest in climate change and the knowledge base for action has generated the structures and forces in which the IPCC as an organisation and method for producing authoritative ways to know climate change has emerged, which in the book, I identify as the IPCC’s practice of and for writing climate change.

Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1⁰C above 1850–1900 in 2011–2020.’ These words are from the Summary for Policy Makers of the Synthesis Report of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report. It is the aim of this book to help you understand exactly how, and why, the collective body of scientists has come to these, and many other, conclusions. Addressing this aim requires that you understand two facets of the nature of our planet. Firstly, you need to understand how our planet ’behaves’ under what we might choose to call ’normal conditions’. Secondly, you need to understand how human activity has moved us away from that normal. The following chapters will take you through both of these in the necessary detail. In this chapter we present a quick overview, as well as introducing you to the IPCC.

In this chapter we end our more strenuous hike and start to enjoy a technically more relaxed stroll through the landscape of risk. An important feature throughout the book is that, for all the data examples given, we first start with a section “About the data”. In this way, you gain experience in finding and preparing the relevant data before starting with a statistical analysis. In order to discuss the consequences of climate change, we analyze the Hadley Centre Central England Temperature (HadCET) dataset. For the implications of a rise in temperature to the loss in volume of alpine glaciers, we apply the techniques learned to the case of the Lower Arolla Glacier in Switzerland. For an application to the realm of agricultural production, we look at the consequence of climate change to wine production. For this, we analyze data from a specific wine producer in France. We end this stroll with an interesting and perhaps somewhat surprising story of the astronomer Johannes Kepler. The story relates to his second marriage and the measurement of the volume of wine barrels.

Climate change is a profound global concern. The burning of fossil fuels for energy production has increased emission levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere, generating an increase in global warming of around 1.1 degrees Celsius. Net global anthropogenic GHG emissions are increasing across all major sectors as a result of rising global activity in industry, energy supply, transport, agriculture and construction. This is contributing to changes in the earth’s climate, such that global average temperatures have risen considerably since measurements began in the mid-19th century, affecting weather patterns and sea levels.

This chapter applies Pragmatic Constructivism to interpret and assess two communities of practice: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which frames the problem of global warming, and the Conference of Parties (COP), which meets annually to discuss international society’s response within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Applying the book’s two normative tests – inclusive reflexivity and deliberative practical judgment – the chapter demonstrates how the IPCC maintains epistemic authority by appropriately managing the boundary that separates expert knowledge from non-expert opinion. The analysis of COP operates at a micro level (e.g. how physical space at the Conference is organized) and the macro level (e.g. whether it would be better to organize deliberations on a ‘minilateral’ basis). The chapter notes how this debate has been bypassed by the Paris Agreement and the decision to commit to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for emissions reduction. It assesses the consequences of that collective judgement in light of the progress made at the 2021 Glasgow COP. The chapter concludes that the problem should now be framed in terms of states delivering on the commitments they have made, and it considers the usefulness of nationalist dispositions and citizens assemblies in that process.

Most recently, the worlds attention has been captured by what seems like disparate issue areas: COVID-19, institutionalized racism, and (a longer-running theme) climate change. This book argues for the glue that connects these three issue areas in an intimate way: relationality. Indeed, the ways of coping with each of these areas requires that people discover, re-discover, and nurture the bonds that help one connect with the other. The chapter discusses how a relational model could be applied to carbon mitigation, and how this would differ from the model of a carbon tax. Directions for future work includes the need to work out how the relational mechanism interacts with behavioral mechanisms identified by Ostrom and Olson. How do we craft institutions that take advantage of all these models? How do we create institutions that increase connectedness between people who are not ordinarily part of the same social network? This book constitutes a small but significant step toward a concerted research program revolving around relationality.

This chapter discusses the IPCC’s performance as a ‘learning’ organisation. The Panel has responded to novel challenges by adjusting its governance structure and its underlying objectives and principles. Building on a heuristic of organisational learning, we reconstruct and map these past learning processes. We find that most of these challenges resulted in the IPCC adopting an adaptive mode of learning by incrementally adjusting procedures. There were only a few moments of reflexive learning. Against this backdrop, the chapter discusses future challenges for the IPCC emerging from the Paris Agreement and the call for a ‘solution-oriented assessment’. The IPCC has faced demands in the past for greater political relevance, geopolitical representation, scientific integrity, transparency, and accountability. In the post-Paris world, the Panel has to cope with its role in the polycentric architecture of the climate regime and its role as ‘mapmaker’ in the assessment of pathways to achieve the Paris ambition. We conclude by discussing how the IPCC can best use its learning capacities in responding to these challenges.

Scenarios are among the most visible and widely used products of the IPCC. Many kinds of scenarios are used in climate research, but emissions scenarios and the socio-economic assumptions that underpin them have a distinct status because the IPCC orchestrated their development. They have evolved from assessment cycle to assessment cycle and serve as ‘boundary objects’ across Working Groups and as instruments of policy relevance. The field of Integrated Assessment Modelling has emerged to produce these scenarios, thereby taking centre stage within the IPCC assessment process. Because these scenarios harmonise assumptions about the future across disciplines, they are essential tools for the IPCC’s production of a shared assessment of climate research and for ensuring the policy relevance of this assessment. Yet, the reliance on a relatively small set of complex models to generate scenarios spurs concerns about transparency, black-boxed assumptions, and the power of IAMs to define the ‘possibility space’.

Past efforts to mitigate planet-level dangers have included modest initiatives such as climate treaties, arms control deals, or limited pandemic precautions, as well as bolder moves like the US government’s 1946 proposal for international control of atomic weapons, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, or Ronald Reagan’s 1983 missile shield initiative. While these were all important steps in the right direction, they have fallen far short of what is needed. In all cases, the most salient stumbling block has been the way every nation continues to fend for itself in a ruthlessly competitive world arena. An effective response to these four mega-dangers will require moving beyond the international self-help system and creating coordinated instruments of global governance.

The first peer-reviewed analysis of how methane emissions affect the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas was published by my colleagues and I in 2011. We suggested that methane emissions from shale gas, as well as from conventional natural gas, were probably great enough to completely offset any climate advantage that might accrue from reducing carbon dioxide emissions from a switch from coal to natural gas. The paper has stimulated further investigation in the subsequent nine years, with a growing number of research papers on this topic, as reviewed here. The initial conclusion that methane emissions from both shale gas and conventional natural gas make these very poor bridge fuels continues to hold true. The greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas is worse than that of coal, when methane emissions are considered and compared to carbon dioxide over an integrated 20-year time period after emission. Increased emissions from shale gas production in North America alone have probably caused roughly 40% of total global increase in atmospheric methane from all sources. Unless methane emissions can be drastically reduced, shale gas is not a viable option in a climate-smart future.

The Earth surface carbon cycle consists of regular flows between the major sinks: atmosphere, ocean, soils and biota. It is in balance, except for flows to and from long-term storage (methane formations, deep ocean, lithosphere), which comprise the deep Earth carbon cycle. At the beginning of life in earth history, about 500 million years ago, the atmosphere was carbon-rich, and Earth temperatures were vastly hotter than today. Over time most of this carbon was withdrawn from the surface carbon cycle through ocean sedimentation, reactions with weathering rock and migration of organic matter to the lithosphere, where they were transformed into fossil fuels. This eventually produced the temperate Earth, which facilitated human evolution, but now, by extracting and burning fossil energy, humans are recreating conditions for the hotter Earth of earlier times. These direct carbon emissions can be amplified by feedback mechanisms, whereby initial warming releases carbon stored in formerly stable methane deposits and alters the carbon cycle so as to increase the size of the atmospheric sink relative to other sinks or changes in the Earth’s albedo. The politics of controlling emissions is further complicated by lags in warming and subsequent climate impacts.

Global warming became a growing public concern following Jim Hansen’s US Senate testimony in 1988 asserting that the warming was happening. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in response to this concern. The IPCC issues periodic assessments summarizing recent scientific developments relating to climate change. Climate models were used to attribute global warming to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Certain types of extreme weather can also be probabilistically attributed to these causes. The effect of aerosols and stochastic variability on the past global warming signal is described. The IPCC projects the global warming signal into the future using a range of carbon dioxide emission scenarios, resulting in different degrees of predicted warming. The importance of regional climate change and the difficulty of predicting it are discussed.