Climate Change Inaction and Moral Nihilism

Belize and Climate Change : The Costs of Inaction

Climate Protection Assessment of Costs of Inaction or Delayed Action of Climate Protection and Climate Change

T he ultimate objective of the climate convention and of related instruments like the Kyoto protocol is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level that avoids dangerous climate change. In order to considerably reduce risks of climate change, the European Union already decided a climate protection target: to prevent global surface temperature to increase more than 2°C (Celsius) compared to pr...

Climate Change, Human Rights, and Moral Thresholds

I t is widely recognized that anthropogenic climate change will have harmful effects on many human beings and in particular on the most disadvantaged. In particular, it is projected to result in flooding, heat stress, food insecurity, drought, and increased exposure to waterborne and vector-borne diseases. Various different normative frameworks have been employed to think about climate change. ...

The Economics of Inaction on Climate Change: A Critique

Economic models of climate change often take the problem seriously, but paradoxically conclude that the optimal policy is to do almost nothing about it. We explore this paradox as seen in the widely used DICE model. Three aspects of that model, involving the discount rate, the assumed benefits of moderate warming, and the treatment of the latest climate science, explain the timidity of the mode...

The Moral Rhetoric of Climate Change

Communication in the media about climate change in the United States is complicated by the intensely ideologically polarized state of the debate surrounding the issue; moral rhetoric is an important dimension of how ideology is communicated. In this study we examined how moral rhetoric regarding this issue differs on the basis of a publication's perceived ideological lean. To address the questi...