Blackwell Reference Online

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Comment on this article   Climate change is arguably the most important environmental problem facing the world today, and it has thus been the focus of substantial popular as well as scholarly attention. Over the past century, the earth's average surface temperature has increased by 0.74 degrees centigrade ( IPCC 2007 :8). Most scientists agree that the observed temperature increases are consistent with the anticipated effects of the vast increase in levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere that have resulted from the burning of fossil fuels as well as other human activities. The overall warming has produced long-term shifts in average regional temperatures, precipitation, and sea levels, and this pattern is expected to accelerate as the quantities of GHGs emitted continue to increase. While the scientific discussion of anthropogenic climate change can be traced to the late nineteenth century, the focus on the politics of climate change has much more recent origins. Climate change emerged as a political issue during the mid to late 1980s, and its rise as a focus of social science research paralleled the explosion in research within the field of global environmental politics that also began during the late 1980s and has continued through to the present ( Stevis 2006 ). The field of global environmental politics has established itself within the larger realm of international ... log in or subscribe to read full text