Climate change involves human societies in problems of loss: depletion, disappearance, and collapse. The climate changes and changes other things, in specifically destructive ways. What can and should sociology endeavour to know about this particular form of social change? This article outlines the sociology of loss as a project for sociological engagement with climate change, one that breaks out of environmental sociology as the conventional silo of research and bridges to other subfields. I address four interrelated dimensions of loss that climate change presents: the materiality of loss; the politics of loss; knowledge of loss; and practices of loss. Unlike “sustainability”—the more dominant framing in the social sciences of climate change—the sociology of loss examines what does, will, or must disappear rather than what can or should be sustained. Though the sociology of loss requires a confrontation with the melancholia of suffering people and places, it also speaks to new solidarities and positive transformations.

The paper addresses the question whether national decision-making has become increasingly interdependent in recent decades, and what role “world models” play in any such trend. These questions are scrutinised by utilising the “Historic Hansard” corpus, which contains all records of the UK Parliament from 1803 to 2005, complemented by other corpora. The results show that references to other countries were most frequent in parliamentary debates very early in the 19th century. However, allusions to other countries have evolved from referencing case examples to referencing policies that are constructed and branded as models. The idea of transferable models caught on particularly strongly from the 1950s onward. The other corpora used for the study confirmed that these changes reflect a global trend. Hence, the post-war era has witnessed a worldwide spread of the idea of model as a precondition for a global proliferation of named models.