German Sociology Professor Discusses Global Warming

A preeminent sociology professor from the University of Munich spoke to a packed audience in the Tsai Auditorium last night on the potential of contemporary global risks—such as climate change—to drive a new world order.

Ulrich Beck, who is known for his highly influential 1986 work, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, was hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Science, Technology and Society program. He examined the possible upsides of global risks on the scale of climate change, the current financial crisis, and terrorism.

“The driving impetus of [this talk] is that things going on in science and technology are altering our lives,” said Sheila Jasanoff, a Kennedy School professor who moderated the talk. “It is incumbent on all of us as citizens, scholars, and students to think more deeply about the phenomena taking shape around us.”

Beck told the packed crowd in Tsai that these three crises could lead to a positive shift in the way nations interact with each other.

“Faced against a widespread feeling of doom, I want to ask is there an enlightenment faction, are there opportunities in climate change?” he asked.

Beck defined a “cosmopolitan moment” as a moment when certain risks are so extreme that the “state of normalcy and the state of emergency overlap” and the time is ripe for transnational collaboration.

“If destruction and disaster are anticipated, they can be used as a compulsion to act,” Beck said. “[Catastrophe] shakes [people] up out of their indifference, creating a public sphere of action based on community.”

Beck said he thinks the threat of climate change is sufficiently “irreversible” and “catastrophic” to lead to resolutions among “different parties, nations, religions, friends, and foes.”

He also said that an international climate law could be one of the effects of this cosmopolitan moment and that it was important that the social sciences present problems as global, instead of merely national, concerns.

Panelists said Beck’s talk was “inspiring” and “important” but responded with comments and questions of their own.

One question repeatedly raised was whether cosmopolitan moments—in particular climate change—will actually catalyze these possibilities for new action.

Peter Hall, a research fellow at the Kennedy School, said he thinks the “intense conflict about who is to address the cost of resolving climate change conflicts” might significantly delay international action.

Audience members reacted in a similar manner to panelists, touting the speech as a “big contribution” to the discussion surrounding climate change, but said they were unsure as to how effectively it will stir globally responsible action.

“This talk was an open challenge, an opportunity to respond,” said Krishanu Saha, a post-doctoral student at MIT. But he added that Beck acknowledged that the solutions he brought to the table were too “shallow” to be effective.

“There are more rich ways of dealing with the moment,” Saha said.

—Staff writer Natasha S. Whitney can be reached at nwhitney@fas.harvard.edu.