Method,Measurement, and Management in IPCC Climate Modeling

The IPCC is the world’s leading scientific body addressing climate change, but there is growing dissatisfaction with its heavily economic and econometric approach to analyzing the climate-relevant aspects of human thought and behavior. This article documents and discusses the problem before sketching two examples of how other cultural domains besides the economic—the political and cosmological—might be incorporated into modeling the human dimensions of climate change. In conclusion, the article deploys these examples to explore why the IPCC has been reluctant to model non-economic realms of culture. The results underscore the importance of Victor’s (Nature 520:27–29, 2015) call for a parallel global mechanism to address the IPCC’s evasion of controversial policy-relevant questions.