If the last twenty years of climate change negotiations resulted in conflict in environmental policy, they will turn to political dynamics arising from the a stage of ‘Policy in environmental conflict’ creating a new set of geopolitical dynamics that are not only additive but interactive in uncertain manners with the previous intractable political 6 dynamics, making the situation even more intractable and complex to solve, as will be shown in Chapter 4. This brings important repercussions in the political arena when dealing with Loss and Damage and attribution of responsibility and liability among other issues. However, as a comparative study between the ozone layer case and climate change will show, not even this is enough to conclusively establish the attribution of onset and extreme weather events to climate change due to intangibility.
Now that extreme weather events have become more frequent, predictions could be matched with real time observations. In Chapter 3 we return to an epistemological perspective to analyze Giddens’ paradox that states that climate change will not be solved until its intangible nature becomes tangible. In Chapter 2, risk assessments become political and ethical arguments are set forth in such antagonistic ways using science in an ideological manner that this protraction can only be analyzed through the framework of intractability.
When science identifies a phenomenon that involves a risk to humanity, such as climate change, this cannot be interpreted unitarily due to intangibility transferred to the political arena as risk assessments. The acquisition of knowledge from the climate system due to its intangibility leads to a set of intrinsic, unavoidable epistemological problems that will determine the complexity of its study and limit the capacity to investigate and to predict it as will be shown in Chapter 1.
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