The most poignant exemplar of this addictive behaviour today is the social response to climate change, in which enormous scientific, intellectual, political, diplomatic, and emotional resources have been mobilized to violate all our precepts on a magnificent scale in a top-down, knowledge-based control fantasy aimed at modifying the evolution of the coupled human-Earth system in particular ways.
Those who have alternative framings are ignored if they can’t be pilloried. Climate models segue from providing scenarios requiring serious contemplation to being treated as windows on the real future, while climate-change scientists become sources of absolute wisdom providing advice on restructuring social, cultural, and economic systems around the world. Many readers might disagree energetically with this portrayal, but we reiterate an empirically unavoidable embarrassment: after nearly 20 years of effort, this formalized, bureaucratic, and highly partial process has made no progress in reducing human emissions of greenhouse gases, even though the central article of faith and the main motivation in climate-change politics and policy is that such reductions are needed immediately. From the perspective of that framing, the problem only continues to get worse. Meanwhile, the identification and exploration of option spaces – particularly those that enhance the human capacity to be nimble in the face of a dynamic Earth system (in the parlance of climate-change, to adapt) – has been largely ignored.