The climate change models have many different properties from predicting the rising carbon dioxide levels to changing governmental policies accordingly. Yet, sometimes these models fail to operate due to lack of various perspectives in the calculations.
A paper, written by scientists at the University of Maryland, addresses this issue as the climate change models do not take sociology into account while making scientific calculations:
“The Human System has become strongly dominant within the Earth System”
The two main points in this paper are that the models do not integrate population and GDP growth into the calculations in a feedback loop and that the models see controlling the climate change as an additional cost rather than a vital necessity or a good investment.
The solution to the lack of perspective in these models can be Earth System Models (ESMs) in place of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). ESMs take many parameters into account and create a system that will show the bi-dimensional effects of a parameter. For example, IAMs analyze the effect of population on climate change just like ESMs, but they do not analyze the effect of the climate change on the population.
Likewise, the current solution to the climate change is to massively reduce the fossil fuel usage. This solution rather stands too idealistic and doesn’t hold any reality, because it is not cost-effective. Instead, if an analysis was made on how the climate change affects the rivers and natural sources that humans feed on, it could be seen that the climate change creates a worse scenario in terms of cost-effectiveness.
The social aspect of this issue is not all that there is. There is also an issue of human rights to be discussed when it comes to climate change. It has been proposed by professionals that humans are in an epoch since the Industrial Revolution. What it means is that the humans are seen to be the major factor in affecting the evolution in Earth. Yet, it is inevitable that the changes in Earth will affect our evolution as a result.
Maybe ESMs will be a start to approaching to the climate change differently.
[via treehugger]
