Ethics of Climate Change Prediction

Professor John Broome will speak on "Ethics in the IPCC process" at the Centre for Climate Economics and Policy, Australian National University in Canberra, 5:30pm, 28 April 2015.

The Fifth Assessment Report is the first of the IPCC’s reports that has explicitly given a place to ethics. Two philosophers were included as Lead Authors for this purpose. However, an IPCC report is designed to be a review of scientific literature, and the process of writing it is organised with that aim in mind. Philosophy does not fit easily into that framework. Moreover, IPCC reports are commissioned by governments and must ultimately be approved by governments. Each sentence in the summaries for policymakers has to be explicitly approved by a consensus among all governments. This poses further difficulties for ethics in the IPCC, since ethics tends to be politically contentious.

Professor John Broome will describe how the process went from the point of view of a moral philosopher, and assess how successful the IPCC has been in its aim of taking account of the importance of ethics in responding to climate change.

 John Broome is Emeritus White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and an Adjunct Professor at ANU. He was once Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol. For the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, he was a Lead Author in Working Group 3 and a member of the Core Writing Team of the Synthesis Report.