The Handbook of Global Science, Technology, and Innovation

Chapter 26Global Climate Change and the Direction of Technological Change

Andrew Tylecote

Introduction

This chapter presents an unfamiliar approach to a familiar issue: man-made climate change. It is known that the emission of greenhouse gases tends to cause global warming, that the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, persists in the atmosphere for centuries, and that emissions of this and other greenhouse gases are amply high enough to cause substantial and continuing warming. Since most of the world’s population lives in areas in which excessive heat already presents problems, this must be of deep concern, except to those who disbelieve the science. It is also clear that rising temperatures will lead to shifting rainfall patterns and other meteorological miseries (“extreme weather events”). It follows that mankind needs to take action to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions (GGe) quickly and far – indeed to zero: the more challenging because of rising population and rising income per head, which must tend to push them up. Technological change across a wide front will play a crucial role. A wide range of economic (and other) incentives will be required both to drive such change and to get GGe-saving (“carbon-saving”) technologies taken up as fast as possible.

This is all so familiar as to be almost banal – see Stern (2009) and next section. And yet GGe are not only continuing, but continuing to rise, because few countries are taking action which matches the magnitude of the ...