On Hypo-Real Models or Global Climate Change: A Challenge for the Humanities

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. . . .Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.-President Barack Obama 1The rationality and irrationality of science are questions never only of the present and the past, but also for the possible future.We can learn from our mistakes-which also means that an alternative science is always possible.Not only an alternative theory, but an alternative theory of cognition, an alternative relationship of theory and practice, and an alternative practice of this relationship.-Ulrich Beck 2"Perhaps"-one must [il faut] always say perhaps for justice.There is an avenir for justice and there is no justice except to the degree that some event is possible which, as event, exceeds calculation, rules, programs, anticipations and so forth.-Jacques Derrida 3By the end of 2013, several new climate-related records had been set: twelve of the warmest years ever recorded had occurred between 1988-2013; Arctic ice was at its smallest measured size; and no one under the age of twenty-eight had experienced a month of below-average global temper-1.Barack Obama, "Inaugural Address by President Barack Obama," Whitehouse.gov,21