Title: The fantasy of “social tipping points” — and what it can teach us about incorporating social feedbacks into climate response strategies
In the face of slow climate mitigation progress, some scientists and advocates have pinned hopes on “social tipping points” for climate action. Two centuries of scholarship across multiple fields show that nonlinear social change is far more complex than this metaphor suggests. Yet the metaphor’s misapplication challenges social scientists to better articulate how social factors can be integrated into climate response strategies. This is particularly salient for solar geoengineering, where recent studies have developed conceptual frameworks for incorporating social drivers and feedbacks into potential deployment trajectories.
This talk reviews these nascent frameworks and identifies limitations in how modelers approach the incorporation of social factors into solar geoengineering research, assessment, and governance. It connects these efforts to broader questions about how social dynamics are represented in mitigation science, discourse and policy. The talk then outlines an alternative approach to incorporating social dynamics into responding to climate change — one grounded in qualitative research and civic engagement.
