Category Archives: Week 14: Climate Change

Society has progressed so far in the last few hundred years; we have invented electricity, airplanes, and yet the one thing we have not been able to figure out is stubbornness. That leads us to the continued scientific reality that climate change is real and there is quite a bit of consensus surrounding this reality.Continue reading “Day Off in Kyoto, Got Bored at the Temple”

The Bush Sr. administration, although eventually signing the UNFCCC at the Earth Summit in Rio, was initially very hesitant to sign any environmental agreements, let alone even attend the summit in the first place. There were very good reasons for Bush and his administration to feel this way. For one, the U.S. was undergoing aContinue reading “Hesitance Towards Climate Change Agreements”

In Behind the Curve, Joshua Howe shows that the connection between better scientific knowledge and climate policy is not as strong as many people think. Even as scientists grew more confident that CO2 emissions were warming the planet dangerously, politics did not follow what the scientists were saying. Instead of taking action, the political debatesContinue reading “Climate Change”

Initially President Bush didn’t want to sign any binding agreement climate agreement, “For the economically conservative President Bush, a carbon tax was both undesirable and politically untenable” said Joshua Howe. The president was under pressure from both the US senate which unanimously voted not to sign any such agreement without the guarantees from other developingContinue reading “Climate Change, can America stop it?”

 The article states that during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, the ones who thought of setting climate change policy aside and that it would work during their campaign process of becoming president of the United States. It was also a way that it can be politically used for people to vote forContinue reading “What do you think the United States used climate change for?  “

The Bush Sr. administration was hesitant to sign the Kyoto Protocol because they believed that the reduction of emissions would cost the U.S. a lot of money especially in energy-intensive sectors. Also the U.S. have a concern that developing countries would not be up held to the same standards which would put the U.S. inContinue reading “climate change”

From the beginning, the groups of people most interested in studying and mitigating carbon emissions have set the terms of the “global warming” debate—to the detriment of policy change. As historian Joshua Howe argues, climate scientists adopted a “science first” approach to political debates, which tragically omitted the cultural, social, and human ramifications of globalContinue reading “#NoRegrets”

According to the article, the Bush Sr. Administration was reluctant to sign the Kyoto Protocol in part because of concerns that it resembled a form of “foreign aid”—a politically sensitive move during a period of economic recession, when public attention was more focused on domestic struggles and the Persian Gulf War. President Bush was worriedContinue reading “Bush, the Climate, and Darth Vader”

Concern about climate change isn’t something new, as scientists began noticing the effects of the compounded levels of CO2 on the Earth’s temperature during the early 1950s and the 1960s. This increase in CO2  caused scientists to advocate for change, which obviously required them to enter politics, something that scientists historically have avoided; in “Continue reading “Climate Change vs Economic Growth, What to Choose?”