Framing a Climate Policy Statement

As of the year 2012, the discourse of public policy documents related to the reversal of climate change has focused on legitimizing scientific findings that support action to reduce climate change, but provide minimal guidance describing how the process of reversing climate change should be conducted. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2009 Report Summer for Policy Makers does not provide a single recommendation, nor a discernable deliverable for policy makers around the globe to implement. Written by a similar cast of climate change scientists, the United States’ Presidential Climate Action Project Report (PCAP) of 2008, provides more detail for United States policy makers by proposing emission reductions in a variety of sectors, but neglects to provide insight on how exactly these standards might be met.

The generality and statistical focus of the aforementioned documents is understandable. The introduction of climate change and sustainability efforts in to the American political discourse owes itself to the tireless promotion of statistical information. Without aggressive promotion of the dangers mankind faces from the threat of climate change, dangers backed up by extensive scientific evidence, it is likely that less action to combat climate change would have occurred.

However, these documents were made, and they did provide evidence in support of climate change and the dangers it has and will continue to cause the global population. The push for reducing climate change survived the bevy of negative articles deriding many of the climate scientists that produced the IPCC report after the details of emails suggestive of manipulated figures on climate change became public. Though natural gas has proven a significant deterrent of progress on the reversal of climate change, climate change remains a major political issue.

The simple fact is that the process of informing politicians and the general populace of the fact that the world is getting warmer and that the world getting warmer is bad has reached a saturation point. Those that believe climate change is occurring have read similar statistics change little over the years, with more exact measurements allowed by investment in the advancement of technologies that indicate climate change exciting scientists more than the policy makers and general population that have more of a say in reversing what they are observing. Those that continue to deny the impacts of climate change are unlikely to reverse their opinions without observing its impacts first hand. Beating either side of the climate change argument over the head with new numbers every couple of years provides fodder for politians running for office and nothing else.

In order to evolve the political discourse on climate change past the release of statistics and into substantial change, the next generation of climate change policy documents will need to focus on three things:

1. Developing a standardized the risk-benefit analysis of the implementation of potentially climate change halting technologies.
2. Providing incentives and financial power to the agencies and corporations able to develop technologies deemed to have more benefit than risk.
3. Educate policy makers and the American populace about the technologies that can be implemented successfully.

In fulfilling these three tasks, future climate change policy documents will detail specific policy guidelines that could be implemented by policy makers with less than expert knowledge of the subject matter, provide logical reasoning for the implementation of the policies in question, and promote the benefits of such policy changes to the American populace, whose dollars will need to fund and support technologies and policies related to those outlined in future policy documents. The need for continued research on the extent of climate change persists. Monitoring of glacial ice caps provides invaluable information on the rate at which climate change is occurring, and the rate at which preparations for its effects need to be considered. Correlation analysis and hypothesis testing of the connection between meteorological phenomena and climate change will aid in the targeting of funds to mitigate climate change related natural disasters. But the statistics that result from this research do not provide policy makers with enough information to develop solutions to the climate change problem.