Climate Change: Anticipated Risk or Heralded Catastrophe? Questions from a Thwarted Public Enquiry

Abstract

Regarding climate change, the strategic debate is shifting from an approach in terms of risks to that of a heralded disaster, if humanity is not able to contain the global warning around 1.5°. This chapter analyses the constitution and efforts of the scientific community to generate action, and the relationship between the knowledge produced and the active (or inactive) response of the decision makers (the politicians) or the public (attitudes and behaviour) more generally. It also raises, through a theory of the Paris Agreement, the issue of how action might be undertaken. Dewey’s experimentalism and his conception of the relation between action and knowledge is presented as a way of organising a new arena to tackle the grand challenge of providing the global climate public good, through a universal Public.