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Module Reflections

Climate Change as a Circulation Problem

Caroline S.

• 4 min read
Climate Change as a Circulation Problem
An estuary where freshwater meets the sea, Pacific Northwest. Photo by Caroline Shankel.

Evidence, Risk, Attribution, Models, and Justice

Climate change is best understood not as a single environmental problem, but as a disruption of interconnected circulatory systems of energy, carbon, water, nutrients, organisms, and people. Evidence from multiple independent observations demonstrates that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have created a persistent Earth energy imbalance, leading to global warming, ocean heat uptake, and long-term environmental change. This imbalance, not surface temperature alone, explains why climate impacts unfold with delay, appear uneven across regions, and are difficult to reverse on human timescales.

The climate system consists of interacting components, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, land surface, and biosphere, whose exchanges regulate Earth’s energy and material flows. The oceans play a central role by absorbing over 90% of excess heat and by operating powerful carbon “pumps,” including the solubility pump, which transfers carbon into cold deep waters, and the biological pump, which uses living organisms to transport carbon to depth. Similar pump processes operate on land through vegetation, soils, and microbial activity. Crucially, migration of animals, nutrients, and people functions as a connective mechanism that sustains these processes. When migration corridors are disrupted, ecological regulation weakens and feedbacks that intensify climate change are reinforced.

Carbon dioxide dominates long-term warming due to its persistence and feedbacks with land and ocean systems. Short-lived gases such as methane strongly influence the rate of near-term warming, while water vapor acts primarily as a feedback that amplifies warming rather than serving as an independent forcing.  This distinction explains why Earth System Models explicitly simulate the carbon cycle while treating other greenhouse gases differently, often through prescribed emissions. Carbon dioxide determines long-term climate commitment, while methane mitigation offers rapid but temporary relief. Effective climate governance therefore requires addressing both long-lived and short-lived climate forcers without substituting one for the other.

Climate impacts manifest most clearly through hazards such as heatwaves, floods, droughts, and sea level rise. However, risk emerges not from hazards alone, but from their interaction with exposure and vulnerability. Vulnerability is not a natural condition; it is socially produced through historical, political, and economic processes that shape access to resources, decision-making power, and adaptive capacity. As a result, the same physical hazard can produce very different outcomes across populations. Concepts of resilience and adaptation require careful evaluation, since they can either reduce risk equitably or entrench existing inequalities through maladaptive responses.

Advances in event attribution science now allow researchers to assess how anthropogenic climate change alters the probability or intensity of specific hazards by comparing the observed world with counterfactual climates without human influence. Attribution is strongest for temperature-related extremes such as heatwaves and is increasingly robust for heavy rainfall and coastal flooding, particularly where sea level rise has raised impact baselines. Natural modes of climate variability, such as ENSO, modulate impacts around the long-term warming trend but do not negate the underlying anthropogenic signal. While attribution is probabilistic and hazard-specific, it provides a critical bridge between physical science and policy by enabling discussions of responsibility, loss, and damage without requiring absolute causality.

Climate models extend this attribution logic into the future by simulating climate responses under different emissions pathways. Although uncertainties remain—particularly at regional scales—models robustly project continued warming, sea level rise, and intensification of extremes. Over time, uncertainty increasingly reflects societal choices rather than physical limits, highlighting that future risk depends as much on governance decisions as on geophysical processes.

These insights make climate justice unavoidable in the present. Distributive justice concerns who bears climate impacts and who benefits from mitigation and adaptation. Procedural justice addresses who has voice in defining problems and solutions, and whose knowledge is considered legitimate. Discourses such as whataboutism and fossil-fuel solutionism delay accountability by deflecting responsibility or shifting action into the future through technological promises. In contrast, a just transition emphasizes participatory, context-specific pathways that reduce emissions while protecting livelihoods, rights, and wellbeing.

Taken together, the science of climate change reveals a central truth: climate change is not only an emissions problem, but a circulation problem. Disrupted flows of energy, carbon, water, life, and agency underpin both environmental instability and social injustice. Addressing climate change therefore requires restoring circulation through integrated mitigation, adaptation, and justice-centred governance. 

This one-page synthesis was written as a study reflection while preparing for a test in my MSc module on Climate Change and Environmental Hazards, integrating physical climate science, vulnerability, attribution, modeling, and climate justice.

Reading anchors

This one-pager draws on interdisciplinary climate research and assessment literature, including the following foundational sources, offered here as orientation points: 

Earth system science, energy imbalance, and climate risk

Oceans, heat uptake, and biological regulation

Carbon cycle feedbacks and Earth System Models

Vulnerability, adaptation, and socially produced risk 

Attribution science and loss and damage

Climate justice, legitimacy, and governance

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