Insight on climate change, an essay

[Rideback]

James Greenberg:
"Climate change is no longer something projected on the horizon; it is shaping the conditions of daily life. The tools we use to understand that shift have had to keep pace. Climate models now sit at the center of decisions about risk, infrastructure, and the uneven distribution of vulnerability. They remain imperfect—every model is—but they are grounded in increasingly detailed observations of a world changing faster than expected. This essay is less about whether models can resolve uncertainty than about how they help us navigate it at a moment when environmental change is unfolding with new speed and complexity.
When I first wrote about climate models in 2020, my argument was straightforward: the warming trend was unmistakable, but the tools we used to predict its pace and texture had real limitations. Models, I argued, are abstractions—elegant ones, but abstractions nonetheless—shaped by assumptions, simplifications, and imperfect data. I cautioned not against the science but against apocalyptic certainty. Five years later the world has changed, and so has the science. Some processes are moving faster than expected, denial has mutated into a politics of delay, and the impacts are no longer abstract. Re-examining that earlier analysis now feels less like revisiting a forecast and more like taking stock of the terrain after the clouds have lifted.
Climate models have always required careful scrutiny. They attempt to represent a system of staggering complexity—oceans, soils, ice sheets, forests, clouds, circulation currents—all in constant interaction. No model can capture every process or feedback. But over the past five years, improvements in resolution, physics, and observational data have sharpened what they can tell us. Today’s models no longer sit apart from the world; they are anchored to direct measurements of planetary heat imbalance, ocean warming, ice-mass loss, and shifts in the jet stream. They remain imperfect, but the foundations beneath them have grown stronger.
Uncertainty remains—not because the models are wrong, but because the climate system is inherently nonlinear. Small shifts in initial conditions produce divergent outcomes; feedback loops amplify change; thresholds reveal themselves only once crossed. This is why model projections come in ranges, not guarantees. And this is where my earlier argument still holds: uncertainty is not a flaw in the science; it is a property of the world.
What has changed dramatically is the direction of that uncertainty. In 2020, many processes were expected to unfold slowly: polar melting, rainfall intensification, ocean heat storage. Today we know those processes are accelerating. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average. Extreme heat waves are breaking records by margins once thought impossible. Rainfall events that were “once in a century” now occur every few years. The models didn’t miss the trend—they underestimated the speed.
As models have sharpened scientifically, they have also become cultural artifacts. They embody decisions about what counts as knowledge, which processes are prioritized, and what forms of uncertainty are treated as acceptable. They are shaped by funding structures, institutional priorities, and the metaphors scientists use to describe complexity. Models don’t just project futures; they help construct the futures we imagine. Understanding them requires not only physics but anthropology—an examination of the knowledge systems and power structures that guide their design.
A major shift of the past five years is that the dominant obstacle today is no longer outright denial; it is the political economy of delay. Delay is quieter than denial. It presents itself as caution—“We need better data,” “We can’t move too fast,” “Technology will solve this later.” But delay serves the same purpose denial once did: buying time for industries dependent on fossil fuels, protecting entrenched wealth, and shifting the burden of future loss onto the poor. In this sense, uncertainty becomes a political tool—not scientific caution, but a convenient alibi.
This politics of delay is woven through think tanks, lobby groups, finance, and state institutions. It presents itself as prudence while functioning as protection for those who profit from the status quo. Climate change becomes something to manage later: after elections, after quarterly earnings, after the next crisis. This is the logic that has eroded infrastructure, weakened public institutions, and left communities exposed long before the storms arrived. Delay is not passive; it is a form of governance.
One of the clearest lessons of the past decade is that climate change does not announce itself as a sudden catastrophe. It unfolds through the slow degradation of the systems that sustain modern life. Water tables drop. Grids fail under heat stress. Insurance markets collapse as disasters multiply. Coastal real estate becomes uninsurable. Drought turns farmland to dust. Migration pressures mount as livelihoods disappear. Climate change is not a single event; it is infrastructure breakdown—the unraveling of systems built for a climate that no longer exists.
These breakdowns expose the fault lines of inequality. The wealthy can manage risk through insurance or even relocation. The poor have no such options. In marginalized communities—in Bangladesh, in Chennai, in Central America—the poor face a different reality: saltwater intrusion, failing crops, water shortages, wildfire smoke, and collapsing fisheries. Vulnerability is not an accident of geography; it is produced by political choices, historical dispossession, and economic structures that long predate climate change.
This is why “climate conflict” and “climate refugee” narratives have always been misleading. They isolate climate as the root cause while ignoring how neoliberal restructuring, land privatization, and economic precarity created the vulnerabilities climate change now exploits. Blaming migration on climate alone erases the political responsibilities that made people vulnerable in the first place.
The question, then, is not whether climate change will cause catastrophe. It is whether societies will meet environmental stress with solidarity and adaptation—or with exclusion, authoritarian reflexes, and a fortified politics of fear. Models cannot tell us this. History can. And history suggests that crises often reveal more about political structures than about the forces that triggered them.
New “solutions” have also entered the debate—carbon removal, direct air capture, and geoengineering schemes that promise control but risk reproducing the same inequalities that created the crisis. These technologies may eventually play a role, but they often reflect a desire to solve a political problem with technical fixes, and a society that often prefers technical fixes to political ones.
We now know with much greater clarity that climate change is not a future threat; it is a present condition. Risks will multiply the longer action is delayed, the more infrastructure erodes, and the more inequality deepens. Uncertainty does not protect us. It magnifies vulnerability. It narrows pathways. It raises the cost of adaptation while lowering the capacity to respond.
Yet the future remains open. We still have agency. Optimism may feel too soft for this moment, but resignation is unwarranted. Communities have adapted to immense changes before. Indigenous knowledge systems have long managed landscapes with sophistication that climate models still struggle to capture. Local governments, social movements, and ordinary citizens are already building forms of resilience that bypass national paralysis.
The hard part now isn’t the science; it’s the politics. We know what drives the warming and who benefits from postponing action, and we know who pays the price when systems fail. The question is whether we can build institutions willing to treat climate change as the structural threat it is, not as a problem to be deferred to the next budget cycle or election. The climate will keep changing whether we act or not. What remains uncertain is whether our political system can adjust in time to preserve the world we presently inhabit."
Reference
Greenberg, James B. “The Political Ecology of Climate Change.” In Terrestrial Transformations: A Political Ecology Approach to Society and Nature, edited by Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg, 97–122. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.