IB Environmental systems and societies 6.3D Challenges to Overcome Notes

Climate Action Stalls on Practical and Political Barriers, Not Just Technology

1. Managing climate change needs cooperation, leadership, finance, and public acceptance together, and these conditions are rarely all in place at once.
2. This article covers four practical barriers that block climate action: disbelief, weak finance and planning, failures of leadership, and international inequality.
3. Together these barriers slow or block climate policy at local, national, and global scales.

Barrier: Disbelief That Climate Change Is a Serious Problem

1. Several common misconceptions lead people to doubt that human-caused warming is real or urgent.
2. The "CO₂ only follows temperature" argument
   1. Some sceptics point to ice-core records where CO₂ rose after temperature, and claim this rules out CO₂ as a cause of warming.
   2. In the glacial-interglacial record, temperature did rise first, driven by orbital (Milankovitch) changes, and CO₂ lagged by centuries.
   3. Back then the rising CO₂ acted as a positive feedback that amplified the warming, which does not undermine the greenhouse mechanism.
   4. Today the situation is reversed: human-emitted CO₂ is the initial driving force, not a lagging feedback.
3. The "0.04% is too small to matter" argument
   1. Some argue that CO₂ makes up only about 0.04% of the atmosphere, so it is too dilute to affect climate.
   2. What matters is potency, not volume, because CO₂ strongly absorbs and re-emits infrared radiation.
4. Over-attributing warming to the Sun
   1. Some sceptics claim recent warming is caused by natural solar cycles.
   2. Solar output varies by only about 0.1%, too little to explain the observed warming.
   3. Since the 1960s solar radiation has slightly decreased while global temperatures have kept rising sharply.
5. Distrust of climate models
   1. Some argue that because models give different numbers, none can be trusted.
   2. Models differ in exact values but agree on the same trend of rising temperatures, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather.
   3. The number of models grew from 7 in 2001 to about 40 in 2013 and over 100 by 2021, improving validation.