Introduction

James Hansen (2008, pp. 7–8), a climate scientist of global renown and director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is unambiguous in his diagnosis of climate change and its profound implications: ‘Our home planet is dangerously near a tipping point at which human-made greenhouse gases reach a level where major climate changes can proceed mostly under their own momentum.’ Hansen is also outspoken on what should be done about the issue. The ‘only resolution’ he sees for the future of the human species is ‘to move to a fundamentally different energy pathway within a decade’. Yet Hansen also identifies a ‘huge gap between what is understood about global warming — by the scientific community — and what is known about global warming — by those who need to know: the public and policymakers’ (Hansen, 2008, p. 11). And he is also very aware that preserving our planet as we know it ‘will not be easy: special interests are resistant to change and have inordinate power in our governments […]’ (p. 8). Social scientists can help with illuminating what the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) calls the ‘gap between scientific evidence and political response’ (UNDP, 2007, p. 4) and with understanding and questioning the power asymmetries that undermine the political reactions to climate change that climate scientists deem necessary.