Earth System Science, the IPCC and the problem of downward causation in human geographies of Global Climate Change

Abstract

Environmental determinist explanations of human behaviour have been few and far between in human geography since the Second World War. Environmental determinism is, however, resurfacing in human geography particularly when climate change is the topic of investigation. In this paper, we trace this revival and link it to the dominance of Earth System Science (ESS) and the institutional process of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the climate change research community. In particular, we want to show how findings coming out of ESS and communicated through the IPCC create a discourse of hierarchical scale and downward causation that prescribes agency to climate. We suggest that viewing scale as a social construction opens up for the analysis of climate change and its societal effects and interpretations outside the official script of the inevitability of adaptation.

Keywords:

• environmental determinism
• climate change
• IPCC
• Earth System Science
• scale
• adaptation