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E-book Science Fiction and Climate Change : A Sociological Approach
Despite intermittent upsurges of climate change scepticism among conservative politicians and journalists in the Anglosphere, there is now a near consensus among climate scientists – and indeed amongmost other scientists – that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to possibly disastrous effect. Recent projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) point to global surface temperature increases of between 0.3 and 4.8 degrees between 1986–2005 and 2081–2100 and global rises in sea level of between 26 and 82 centimetres (Stocker et al., 2013: 23). Subsequent research by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), factoring in the effects of marine ice-sheet instability in Greenland and the Antarctic, points to global rises in sea level of between 30 and 250 centimetres by 2100 (Goodell, 2017: 304). There is also evidence that recent increases in heat waves and flooding are related to climate change; and that these indicate ‘significant vulnerability’ to climate variability on the part of both ecosystems and human systems (Bindoff and Stott et al., 2013: 871; Field et al., 2014: 6). Despite the 25 United Nations climate change conferences held between 1995 and 2019, carbon emissions continue to rise on what the IPCC describes as a ‘business as usual’ basis. The results are already apparent.
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