Climate Change: a Theoretical Review

Climate Change has been undoubtedly the most illustrious environmental issue since late 20th century. But neither the discourse merely emerged during that time, nor it was problematized in the same way since its onset. History of Climate Change discourse reveals that from a purely scientific concern it has turned into a public agenda that is nowadays more inclined to be development problem. Transformations have brought about a complete new paradigm every time. This article presents a theoretical analysis of the Climate Change discourse and to do so it captured the underlying philosophy of the issue using Thomas Kuhn’s well-known thesis of ‘paradigm shift’. In particular it discusses about the crisis that lead the issue towards transformations; explores key perspectives around the crisis thus representation of the issue in the environmental discourse over the time. While this paper establishes that with the beginning of the 21st century, the discourse entered into a new paradigm and will reach to a critical point by the end of 2012, it finally postulates some measures that the discourse might integrate with the existing to advance beyond that point.