Bibliographic record
Abstract
This issue of the Australian International Law Journal('AILJ') engages with a challenge that will dominate international law and legal institutions throughout this century--climate change. We are most grateful to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr Ben Saul, for allowing us this opportunity to solicit contributions from leading Australian scholars and practitioners working and researching in the field of international climate law for this special symposium issue of the AlLJ. International law has always been at the centre of responses to climate change. This began in 1988 when the United Nations General Assembly noted that 'climate change is a common concern of mankind' and encouraged the international community to agree on concrete measures to address the problem. (1) The main products of ensuing international legal responses were the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2) (VNFCCC) and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (3) While the UNFCCC articulates fundamental objectives, the most important being to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level which would avoid dangerous climate change, the Kyoto Protocol sought to make material progress towards this objective through specific emissions limitation or reduction targets for industrialised countries. Since these foundation stones for international climate law were first laid, there has been much talk but little action in building a truly effective regime to tackle climate change. This is not least due to the United States' unwillingness, under President George W Bush, to recognise the legitimacy of international climate law, (4) a position which enjoyed Australian support until the change of government in late 2007. The world is now looking to Copenhagen in 2009 when the two-year process of negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, initiated at the Bali climate change summit in December 2007, will to come to a head. The dramatic disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is in line with recent assessments (5) that dangerous climate change is occurring far more rapidly than anticipated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. (6) However, there is no guarantee that Copenhagen will produce agreement on the massive and urgent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that arc required to meet the objective of the UNFCCC. In her contribution to this symposium issue, Shirley Scott, one of Australia's foremost scholars of international relations and law, considers whether international law is or can be up to this task. Scott begins from the premise that climate change meets any reasonable description of a crisis, rather than a confectcd emergency or outrage (in this respect we could cite international terrorism, a phenomenon that poses a far more modest challenge to the international order than climate change, though Scott does not single out any specific examples). Scott asks, provocatively, whether international law has in fact been complicit in the climate crisis by facilitating the growth of the global capitalist economy, and whether the capitalist system is compatible with the objective of ecological sustainability. The question for Scott then becomes whether international law can now be released from its entanglement with economic globalisation and become 'the engine of a genuinely sustainable economy?' Here she focuses on the inherent limitations in negotiating multilateral environmental agreements, which accentuate competition between states, rather than leading naturally to cooperation, even when the very future of human civilisation is at stake. Open international negotiations between sovereign states as equals appear as unsuited to achieving action on climate mitigation measures as parliamentary democracies, where craven policies appealing to domestic concerns over modest rises in fuel and other prices linked to carbon emissions rule the day. (7) Scott concludes with a call to arms for international lawyers to engage with climate change, rather than leaving discussion to economists and philosophers. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".