Mainstreaming climate change sociology

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report on physical understanding of the climate system, released August 2021, concluded that human influence has unequivocally warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land (IPCC 2021). This came as no great surprise given the Fifth and Fourth Assessment reports released in 2014 and 2007 concluded exactly the same thing. Keep going back and the only discernable difference in headline conclusions from IPCC assessments is the degree of confidence with which they are put. In 1995, the balance of evidence pointed toward human influence on the climate. By 2001, the evidence that humans were responsible for most observed change was getting stronger. Increasing confidence in our understanding of climate change and its likely trajectory is to be expected. Behind subtle changes in the language used to express headline assessment findings is both a considerable global research effort and vastly improved understanding of climate changes and drivers at finer spatial and temporal scales. Of course, IPCC assessments still have their limitations. While it is known, for example, that tipping elements in the climate system increase the risk of abrupt and irreversible change at higher levels of global warming, these processes remain difficult to model (IPCC 2021). Climate agreements and policies informed by IPCC assessments proceed, for the most part, as if tipping points are unlikely when, in reality, they are poorly understood (Lenton et al. 2019). My main concern in this essay though is the continuing sociological naivety of IPCC assessments and many of the policies they subsequently inform. It is not that IPCC assessments ignore the social dimensions of climate change altogether. In fact, they report on risks to human health, livelihoods, food systems, cities and natural resource availability alongside vulnerability and adaptive capacity in relation to these risks. What renders the assessments sociologically naïve is not ignorance of the anthropogenic drivers and consequences of climate change but simplistic assumptions about the relationships between science, policy and politics and about the dynamics of social change more generally (see Grundmann and Rödder 2019). Placing greater store on the insights of sociologists (and other social scientists) would go some way to addressing this concern and so, to this end, this essay will summarize major trends in climate change sociology before turning to a small number of key, but largely outstanding questions, that demand sociological and transdisciplinary attention. First though, it will address the charge often levelled at sociology that the discipline does not take climate change seriously.