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Three Questions on Climate Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2014

Clare Palmer
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Extract

Climate change will have highly significant and largely negative effects on human societies into the foreseeable future, effects that are already generating ethical and policy dilemmas of unprecedented scope, scale, and complexity. One important group of ethical and policy issues raised here concerns what I call environmental values. By this I do not mean the impact that climate change will have on the environment as a valuable human resource, nor am I referring to the changing climate as a threat to humans in terms of floods, storms, and droughts, important as these are. Rather, I am concerned with the way climate change—and the policies that may be adopted to respond to it—threatens both things we value and, potentially, some of our environmental values themselves.

Type
Roundtable: The Facts, Fictions, and Future of Climate Change
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Fall 2014 , pp. 343 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 United States Wilderness Act, Pub. L. No. 88–577, 16 U.S.C. 1131–36, 88th Cong., 2nd Session, September 3, 1964, www.wilderness.net/nwps/legisact.

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8 O'Neill, John, Holland, Alan, and Light, Andrew, Environmental Values (London: Routledge, 2008).Google Scholar

9 See Clare Palmer and Brendon Larson, “Should We Move the Whitebark Pine? Assisted Migration, Ethics and Global Environmental Change,” Environmental Values (forthcoming). On early view at: www.erica.demon.co.uk/EV/papers/Palmer.pdf.

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18 Leiserowitz and Smith, Knowledge of Climate Change across Global Warming's Six Americas.

19 Leiserowitz et al., Climate change in the American mind.

20 Markowitz, Ezra M. and Shariff, Azim F., “Climate Change and Moral Judgement,” Nature Climate Change 2, no. 4 (2012), pp. 243–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Haidt, Jonathan and Graham, Jesse, “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize,” Social Justice Research 20, no. 1 (2007), pp. 98–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Markowitz and Shariff, “Climate Change and Moral Judgement,” pp. 243–47.

23 Lori Rotenberk, “When It Comes to Climate Change, This Artist Lets the Trees Do the Talking” Grist, December 3, 2013, grist.org/people/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-this-artist-lets-the-trees-do-the-talking/.

24 Jonathan Rowson, A New Agenda on Climate Change, RSA Action and Research Centre, December 2013. Download the report at: www.thersa.org/action-research-centre/learning,-cognition-and-creativity/social-brain/reports/a-new-agenda-on-climate-change.

25 T. J. Kasperbauer makes this argument in “The Implications of Psychological Limitations for the Ethics of Climate Change” (unpublished paper, 2014).