Climate change sociology: Past contributions and future research needs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
That the causes and consequences of climate change are deeply entangled with socioeconomic systems is no longer a provocative statement.Contributions by social scientists have grown impressively in both volume and influence recently.Sociology has played a particularly prominent role in the field, and several excellent recent reviews far more comprehensive than what I will offer here are available [1][2][3][4][5][6].In what follows, I highlight notable findings offered by sociologists who focus on climate change, followed by key priorities in future research.Notable sociological contributions, representing findings with strong agreement across several studies, fall into in three main areas, including social drivers; social impacts; and the power and politics associated with responses to climate change.The research record articulating multiple social factors and their relative weight as drivers of climate change represent what is perhaps the strongest and most extensive set of sociological contributions to climate science and policy.Especially of note is the degree to which sociological research contradicts persistent claims in political discourse, including, first, the fact that population size has at most an indirect association with emissions, in fact economic growth is far more consequential.Second, individual consumption practices and climate action are shaped by multiple socio-cultural factors that belie simplistic, rationalist, 'knowledge deficit' models of human behaviour-information is necessary but by no means sufficient to motivate climate concern and action.The prevailing finding emerging from research on the social impacts of climate change is the inequitable nature of those impacts.Because those peoples who are the most vulnerablenotably many global south regions, and BIPOC, Indigenous, and non-cismales in all regionsare also the least accountable for the emissions that produced the risks in the first place, the inequitable distribution of climate risks also represents a grievous injustice.Third, sociologists have made resoundingly clear that responding to climate change has relatively less to do with technology and economics, where attention is so often directed, and far more to do with power and politics.From the local to the international scale, sociologists have provided evidence of the strong arm of power relations and their influence over political processes in the climate sphere.Most notable has been irrefutable evidence provided of the orchestration of climate denial through the deployment of disinformation by representatives and allies of the fossil fuel industry, effectively postponing proactive policy responses in many western polities for decades.Also notable are studies evidencing the role of media institutions in attenuating the perceived risk of climate change among publics.Sociologists attribute this institutional influence at least in part to the deployment of discourses-human exceptionalism, neoliberalism and technological optimism being particularly consequential-that prescribe a narrow ontological lens through which problem and solution spaces are created.Other studies
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".