Climate Change and Society

Climate change is often framed as a scientific or technical problem — a matter for climatologists, engineers, and policymakers. Sociology insists that it is also, and perhaps primarily, a social problem. The emissions that drive global warming are produced by specific economic systems, consumption patterns, and political arrangements. The vulnerability to climate impacts is unequally distributed across classes, races, nations, and generations. The capacity to respond — through mitigation, adaptation, and compensation — depends on collective action that institutions either enable or obstruct. A purely natural-scientific account leaves these social dimensions invisible.

Environmental sociology emerged in the 1970s with Riley Dunlap and William Catton's critique of the 'human exemptionalist paradigm' — the assumption, built into much classical sociology, that human societies had escaped the ecological constraints that govern other species. Dunlap and Catton's New Ecological Paradigm reinserted biophysical limits into sociological thinking. John Bellamy Foster's work on Marx's 'metabolic rift' (Marx's Ecology, 2000) argued that capitalism systematically disrupts the nutrient and energy exchanges between society and ecosystems. Ulrich Beck's Risk Society (1986, translated 1992) reframed modernity itself as a system producing hazards — including climate change — that transcend national borders and traditional class politics.

By the 2010s, sociology of climate change had matured into a distinct subfield. Kari Marie Norgaard's Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (2011) provided one of the first full ethnographies of how ordinary people experience, ignore, and manage knowledge of climate change. Based on fieldwork in a Norwegian town she calls Bygdaby during the unusually warm winter of 2000-01, Norgaard showed that climate denial is not primarily a deficit of information. Residents knew the science; they watched the news; they saw their ski season shortened. What she documented instead was socially organized denial — the collective cultural work that keeps climate change at the edge of awareness, preserving everyday normality and avoiding the emotions (guilt, fear, helplessness) that direct engagement would provoke. Denial, on this view, is less a cognitive failure than a shared social accomplishment shaped by cultural norms of emotional management, political efficacy, and national identity.