AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

A Changing Climate for Anthropological and Archaeological

Research? Improving the Climate-Change Models
Paul Roscoe

ABSTRACT Climate change is the latest in a dismaying series of challenges that industrialism and modernity have
gifted to humanity. To date, anthropological and archaeological responses have focused largely on the culturally
particularthat is, on the interactions of climate, environment, cultural schema, and social systems in specific
locales and eras. In this article, I urge a complementary response that capitalizes on archaeology and anthropologys
holistic and universalistic investigative aspirations and expertise. For two decades, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) has overseen major efforts to model human social dynamics and their implications for
future climate change. These models are technically sophisticated but economically reductionist and substantively
crude. Here, I review these efforts and provide three examples of how established and future archaeological and
anthropological research could improve them. Recent changes to the IPCCs modeling regime make this an opportune
moment for such a project. [climate change, climate modeling, IPCC, emissions scenarios]

RESUMEN El cambio climatico

es el ultimo
en una serie de preocupantes retos que el industrialismo y la modernidad

le han regalado a la humanidad. Hasta la fecha, las respuestas antropologicas

y arqueologicas
se han centrado
largamente en lo culturalmente particulares decir, en las interacciones de clima, ambiente, esquema cultural, y
sistemas sociales en locales y eras especficos. En este artculo, urjo una respuesta complementaria que capitalice
en el conocimiento y las aspiraciones investigativas holsticas y universalistas de la arqueologa y la antropologa. Por

dos decadas,
el Panel Intergubernamental sobre Cambio Climatico
(IPCC) ha monitoreado grandes esfuerzos para

modelar dinamicas
sociales y sus implicaciones para el cambio climatico
futuro. Estos modelos son tecnicamente

sofisticados pero economicamente

reduccionistas y substantivamente aproximados. Aqu, reviso estos esfuerzos y

arqueologica

proveo tres ejemplos de como

investigacion
y antropologica
establecida y futura los podra mejorar.

del IPCC hace este un momento oportuno para tal proyecto. [cambio
Cambios recientes al regimen
de modelizacion

climatica,

climatico,
modelizacion
IPCC, escenarios de emisiones]

n less than nine decades, if nothing is done, global mean

temperature could rise by 3 4C or more. Higher
latitudes will see 20 percent more precipitation; Africa and
southern Europe, 20 percent less. The intensity and frequency of heat waves, flooding, and tropical cyclones will
have increased; the Arctic ice cap likely will have vanished,
along with 30 percent of the worlds coastal wetlands; and
30 percent of all species will be teetering on the edge of

extinction (Pachauri and Reisinger 2007; see also Anderson

and Bows 2011; New et al. 2011). Or maybe not. The atmosphere may have warmed by no more than 1.9C, with
only modest changes in the distribution of precipitation, the
frequency of extreme weather events, sea-level rise, and
ecosystemic damage (Pachauri and Reisinger 2007).
These are uncomfortably large uncertainties to entertain about so existential a potential threat, and they stem

C 2014 by the American Anthropological

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 116, No. 3, pp. 535548, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12115

536

American Anthropologist Vol. 116, No. 3 September 2014

FIGURE 1.

IPCC modeling of GGEs and their impacts.

from severe limitations in the models used to project and

manage climate change and its effects. These models are
of two kinds: physical models of climate and environmental dynamics, and social models of human processes that
drive or are affected by climate change. Past reports of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provide an example of how physical and human models get
linked together to predict climate futures (Figure 1). The
process begins with a model of global society that projects
how greenhouse gas emissions (GGEs) will develop over the
course of the 21st century (see Figure 1, left-hand box).
These projections are then fed into physical climate models
to produce a range of scenarios about future temperatures,
precipitation regimes, and other climate phenomena (see
Figure 1, center box). These outputs, in turn, serve as input
to still-other human and physical models to assess the effects
on physical and biological environments and on humans (see
Figure 1, right-hand boxes; see also IPCC 2007).
There are major shortcomings in both the physical
and human models used to project climate change and
its effects. Uncertainties about the dynamics of oceanatmosphere heat and carbon transfer, for instance, are
major challenges in modeling the physical climate, and there
are clear deficiencies also in models of sea-level rise (e.g.,
Rahmstorf et al. 2012; see also Lahsen 2005:897901).
These complications are dwarfed, though, by the difficulties
of modeling human society and its developmental dynamics.
Human thought and behavior are as complex as any
phenomenon in the natural world; the social sciences have
as yet only a limited purchase on their workings; and
research to improve them remains a cottage industry
with very little funding and few mechanisms in place to
build the international and interdisciplinary community
needed to discipline ungrounded conjectures with careful
empirical analysis (Rosa and Dietz 2012:4).
Faced with these deficiencies, IPCC researchers relied
in the past on explorative scenarios to forecast future
GGEs. Scenarios are stories that mix qualitative narratives with quantitative modeling; explorative scenarios are a
strategy that manages uncertainties about the future by mapping out allor, at least, all of the more probablethings
that could happen (Borjeson et al. 2006:725). To produce

these explorative scenarios, the IPCC contracted the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA),
a nongovernmental operational research institute based in
Laxenburg, Austria, and the results appeared as the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES; see Nakicenovic and
Swart 2000). The SRES is a triumph of technical sophistication, but its modeling of human social dynamics accounts
for a large fraction of our current uncertainties about future global warming. Over the course of the 21st century,
the SRES projected, total cumulative carbon emissions from
all sources could be as little as 770 GtC or as high as 2,540
GtC, a difference of more than 300 percent (Nakicenovic and
Swart 2000).
A number of anthropologists and other social scientists
have critiqued these sorts of modeling exercises, examining
among other things how they are socially produced, the distribution of certainty that surrounds them, how they help
manufacture consent in the face of scientific uncertainty, and
howdespite these uncertaintiesthey become authoritative instruments of social policy (e.g., Hastrup and Skrydstrup 2013; Lahsen 2005; Rayner and Malone 1998:5974).
These are necessary and useful critiques and carry particular
force when applied to the SRESs human models, where the
technical sophistication that confers authority helps to mask
the analytical shortcomings at their core.
For archaeology and anthropology, though, these limitations are an opportunity for more than critique alone.
To date, the balance of anthropological and archaeological research on climate change has focused on the culturally particular: that is, on the interactions of climate,
environment, cultural schema, and social systems in particular locales and eras (e.g., Castro et al. 2012; Crate 2011;
Crate and Nuttall 2009; Fagan 2000; Hastrup 2009; Hastrup
and Fog Elwig 2012; McGovern 1994; Orlove et al. 2008;
Schwartz 1957). As disciplines holistic in their theoretical aspirations, and cross-cultural and transtemporal in their
empirical reach, however, anthropology and archaeology are
also ideally positioned to improve the human models used in
climate-change simulations (see also Barnes et al. 2013). It is
nave, of course, to imagine that any discipline could model
with precision the dynamics of human social life. However,
there are multiple areas in which we can pare down some of

Roscoe Improving Climate-Change Models

the capacious uncertainties associated with current models

of humanitys role in and response to climate change.
A central problem with the SRES and other human
scenario projects is the disciplinary reductionism at their
core. IIASA emissions scenarios were developed primarily
by economists, econometricians, and operations analysts,
and they essentially reduced human society to its economic
domain, deploying variables such as economic and population growth, technological and infrastructural development,
and land use and land cover that are easily quantified and
articulated with physical models of climate dynamics. Reflecting the extraordinary place that economics currently
holds in the social sciences, where it is treated as a kind of
master discipline (Graeber 2012:90), technocratic policymaking has now all but naturalized this kind of economic
reductionism. The problematic effect, though, is to allow
domain-specific knowledge, methods, and techniques to define what is (and by default what is not) relevant to understanding humanclimate interactions (Orlove 2009:160
161; Rayner and Malone 1998:61). The impact of other
realms of human thought and behaviorthe psychological,
social, political, and ideologicalare treated either as uncertainties or as though they had no autonomous effects at all on
GGE production or the human response to climate change.
As Eugene Rosa and Thomas Dietz (2012:4) observe, even
reasonably robust findings about the social, political, and ideological drivers of GGEs have had no perceptible influence
on IPCC emissions scenarios.
Neil Adger and colleagues identify a major reason for
these failures and omissions: Methods for studying culture
tend to be qualitative, frequently including ethnography and
participant observation, and data from these methods do
not sit comfortably with the quantitative approaches prevalent in other social and natural science on climate change
(2012:112). These methodological differences, though, are
less of a challenge for scenario construction, which relies
heavily on qualitative narratives and therefore provides a
natural portal for incorporating the less-quantifiable findings
of disciplines like anthropology and archaeology.
To illustrate how our disciplines might contribute to
such a project, I provide three examples of how established
and future disciplinary research could shrink two major uncertainties at the core of SRES efforts to envision future
GGEs. The first illustrates how existing anthropological and
archaeological knowledge of past and present human systems
might have reduced a key SRES uncertainty about future
global economic trajectories. The two other examples concern areas of anthropological and archaeological research that
could substantially reduce a second major SRES uncertainty:
the degree to which concerns about the environment will
moderate future economic growth. I suggest that research
on the dynamics of human status competition, its cultural
refractions, and the circumstances under which it manifests
as consumerism could illuminate one of the most powerful
drivers of future economic growth. Concomitantly, crosscultural research on the role of human ideological systems in

537

shaping perceptions of the environment in general and the

climate in particular is a prerequisite for gauging the importance that humans will attach to protecting the environment.
In conclusion, I suggest a few of many other ways in which
anthropological and archaeological findings could improve
the IPCCs emissions scenarios and inform the generation of
less reductive, more holistic scenario frames.
It is an opportune moment to consider such proposals because the Fifth IPCC Assessment Reports, which have
just appeared, seek to accelerate the scenario development
process by opening it up to a broader, interdisciplinary research community (Inman 2011; Moss et al. 2010). The
vehicle for the new strategy is a new climate scenario suite,
the representative concentration pathways (RCPs), which
are normative rather than explorative scenarios (Borjeson et
al. 2006:725). Instead of addressing what could happen to
GGEs in the future as the SRES attempted, they backcast
from imagined GGE futures to assess how different global
developments and policy decisions might take the world
down one climate-change path rather than another.
The social dimensions of the new scenario suite have
yet to be detailed, and it is for this reason that I focus here
on the SRES scenarios to demonstrate how anthropological
and archaeological research can improve human models of
climate change. The SRES case, however, remains relevant
to the new RCP scenario suite. Although modelers will
use the RCPs to backcast from the future, whereas the
SRES scenarios sought to forecast the future, the backcasting
exercise still relies on human models of GGEs. These models
are called the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), and to
get their development underway, it has been proposed that
they incorporate major components of the SRES scenarios
(e.g., ONeill et al. 2014:388389, 397; see also Hallegatte
et al. 2011:152154; Kriegler et al. 2012:812819).
PROJECTING CLIMATE FUTURES FROM THE PAST

To project future anthropogenic GGEs, SRES researchers

started from a premise that their principal drivers are
population trends, technological change, energy demands,
economic development, and agriculture and land use. The
team constructed 40 scenarios to explore how these drivers
might develop and interact over the 21st century. They
grouped them into four qualitative storylines that captured
what they saw as two key uncertainties about the future. One
was the degree to which national economies will converge
in the coming decades, producing a homogeneous world,
or diverge to create a heterogeneous one. The other
uncertainty was the extent to which nations will seek to
balance environmental concerns against economic growth.
Storyline A1 envisioned rapid economic growth coupled
with global economic convergence; A2, slow economic
growth and little or no convergence; B1, global solutions
to economic, social, and environmental sustainability,
combined with economic convergence; and B2, a world
of regional economic fragmentation and intermediate
economic growth (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000:169170,

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American Anthropologist Vol. 116, No. 3 September 2014

179183). Future GGEs and temperatures generally rose

higher and faster under the A1 and A2 storylines than under
the B1 and B2 storylines (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000:7).
Critical evaluation of these scenarios has centered largely
on technical issues such as the exchange rates used for international comparisons, assumptions about future fossilfuel availability, and how to refine scenario spatial scales
for use in local and regional analyses (e.g., Castles and
Henderson 2003; Gaffin et al. 2004; Hoo k et al. 2010).
From an anthropological perspective, though, the more arresting deficiencies stem from the strict economic approach
they adopted in modeling human action.
Consider, for instance, the first key uncertainty that
structured the SRES storylines: the degree to which national
economies would converge or diverge in the 21st century. To calculate future GGEs, the SRES team used the
so-called IPAT (or Kaya) identity, one component of which
is affluence or economic development (measured as per
capita GDP) (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000:105). The uncertainty involved the degree to which per capita economic
productivity in less developed regions of the world would
converge over time toward that of industrialized countries
to produce a homogenous world as opposed to persisting
at (or even deteriorating from) current levels of disparity, resulting in a heterogeneous world (Nakicenovic and
Swart 2000:169174).
The SRES researchers saw convergence resulting from
advances in transport and communication technologies; increased social and cultural interactions; growth in international mobility of people, ideas, and technologies; and the
development of national and international institutions that
enhance productivity growth and technology diffusion. They
associated a heterogeneous world with a stasis in, or reversal of, these infrastructural, institutional, and international
developments. Because they deemed it uncertain whether
and to what degreethe world would follow a convergent,
static, or divergent path, they therefore managed the uncertainty through explorative scenarios that sought to map out
all of the possibilities (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000:177
183).
To this end, the team surveyed a range of academic,
commercial, and educated layperson literature that attempted to predict the course of future world developments
based on recent and contemporary global affairs. These
sources varied from UNESCOs World Culture Report of
1998 and Samuel Huntingtons (1996) Clash of Civilizations
(which appears to have heavily influenced global fragmentation scenarios), through works and scenario constructions
by journalists, corporations, and popular press pundits,
to the writings of Teilhard de Chardin (Nakicenovic and
Swart 2000:173, 179183). As best as can be ascertained,
however, the team failed to consult a single source from the
enormous anthropological and archaeological literature that
exists on the direction and processes of human social-cultural
development over the course of the Holocene. It was an unfortunate omission. These works identify the essential social

and cultural processes responsible for economic divergence

or convergence, and equipped with such a tool kit, the SRES
team could have markedly reduced its uncertainties about
the trajectory of global economic inequities. The last few
centuries have seen polities converge economically, not remain static or diverge, and there are theoretical reasons to
believe this trend will continue into the future.
The Holocene, as archaeology and anthropology long
ago established, has seen a geometric expansion in the territorial and demographic scale of human social systems and
the reach of economic, social, political, and ideological relationships. Hundreds of thousands of small, egalitarian forager communities that existed 10,000 years ago have since
consolidated into just 200 politically centralized nations.
Economic, social, political, and ideological relationships that
once extended no farther than to a handful of nearby communities now reach across the face of the earth. Going forward,
some scholars speculate that the entire human race could
become a single political entity within 500 to 3,000 years
(Carneiro 1978; Hart 1948; Marano 1973; Naroll 1967;
Peregrine et al. 2004).
The dynamics of this expansion and integration have yet
to be fully understood, but there is wide agreement that
it was the product of enlightened self-interests that generated cooperation and collective action, egocentric interests
that promoted exploitation and coercion, or both (for reviews, see Carballo et al. 2014; Claessen and Skalnk 1978).
Throughout the Holocene, at least some individuals and
some collectivities have had interests in expanding the structures and networks of relationship in which they were embedded to capitalize on economies of scale, markets and
profits, increased defensive strength, political or military
reach and power, or congregations and religious influence.
These expansionist and integrative pressures have sometimes
provoked spatially and temporally localized resistance, but
no interests ever seem to have emerged that created an
equally persistent, universal pressure toward global stasis or
fragmentation.
Over time, agents and groups with interests in systemic
and relational expansion have managed to transform these
interests into a social reality through humanitys increasing
capacity to interact with other humans. In the first half of
the Holocene, when human interaction was face-to-face and
brought about largely on foot, the principal vector of interactional expansion was demographic packing. By reducing
travel times required to effect human interaction, increasing population density, nucleation, or both expanded the
number of agents potentially capable of interacting with one
another, facilitating a demographic increase in social system
size (Roscoe 2013).
In the latter half of the Holocene, mechanisms of timespace compressiondevelopments in transportation and
communication that reduced the friction of distance and
facilitated interactions among places (Warf 2011:435)
greatly expanded not just the number of agents capable
of interacting but also the range, nature, and scalability of

Roscoe Improving Climate-Change Models

their interactions. Technological and organizational innovations in transportation (the horse, wind and mechanically
powered watercraft, automobile, rail, and air) expanded
the range of face-to-face interaction. Similar developments
in communication (signaling, writing, printing, radio, TV,
and the Internet) facilitated the time-space distanciation
of interaction (Giddens 1984). For the first time, social activity could be disconnected from face-to-face interaction,
facilitating the stretching of social systems and relationships across time-space. For their part, printing and electronic communications greatly amplified the capacity for
interactional scalingthat is, the ability of one agent to interact simultaneously with many others (Roscoe 2013; see
Harvey 1990:260307, for some of the cultural implications).
Motivated by human interests in expansion, these infrastructural and institutional developments confer the directionality we see in human social-cultural development
through the Holocene: a consistent trend toward ever more
populous, territorially extensive, and organizationally complex social systems and toward ever more wide-ranging
social relationships.
The implications of these social-cultural processes for
economic convergencedivergence have received little anthropological or archaeological attention, and as a result,
they are poorly understood. One plausible scenario, however, suggests a complex trajectory, one dominated initially
by increasing economic heterogeneity but then transitioning
to economic convergence.
Although it seems antic to apply capitalist concepts of
economic productivity to deep history, the human economic
world was relatively homogenous (in SRES terms) until the beginning of the Holocene because hunter-gatherer
economies were universal. As the Holocene progressed,
though, some systems developed intensified levels of economic production and complexity, resulting in a heterogeneity that escalated as time passed. This heterogeneity
would have reached an apogee around the time when the
first intensive agricultural states emerged. At this point,
these states would have constituted the high productivity
pole of a spectrum of economic regimes that had low productivity hunter-gatherers at the other end and pastoralists
and extensive cultivators in between.
Having driven the emergence of economic heterogeneity, however, the processes propelling political integration
would now cause the economic trend to reverse, from
divergence to convergence. This is because the number
of human systems on the planet is finite and because, as
they expand, systems with higher economic productivity
(states) swallow up and incorporate the dwindling number
of smaller scale, lower productivity systems that remain.1
A homogenous world that began as tens of thousands of
low productivity systems before diverging into marked economic heterogeneity, in other words, is now converging toward a homogenous world of higher productivity
systems.

539

FIGURE 2. Drivers and mechanisms of convergence. (Mechanisms of time-

space compression are developments in transportation and communication

that facilitate human interactions at a distance.)

On theoretical grounds, it is difficult to pinpoint when

this reversal occurred. Certainly, though, the incorporation of low productivity systems into high productivity
ones would have been underway some time before innovations in communication and transportation had enabled
at least some industrializing states to extend their imperial, incorporative reach around the globe. Angus Maddisons (2007:382) widely citedalbeit contestedhistorical
estimates of inter-regional spreads in per capita GDP suggest, in fact, that it occurred sometime between 1820 and
1950.
The processes that drove these developments remain
operative today, and there is no obvious analytical reason
why they should halt or reverse in coming decades. At least
some humans and collectivities continue to have interests
in expanding the systems and networks in which they are
embedded, and these interests, in turn, motivate the preservation and improvement of the time-space mechanisms that
transform them into a social reality. The result is a system
in which economic convergence seems more probable over
the next century than stasis or divergence (Figure 2).
Although the macro trend is now toward economic convergence, it might be objected that stochastic noise in the
trend can lead to short-term reversals. History and prehistory are replete with instances of localized collapse. Prior
to 1900, Akkadian, Angkor, Mayan, Roman, Ottoman, and
many other kingdoms and empires peaked and then declined. The 20th century, the era during which we have
reason to believe that global economic productivity began to
converge, has in fact seen the number of independent nations
rise, not fall, as colonial nations surrendered their empires at
midcentury and the Soviet Union collapsed toward the centurys end. Depending on definitions, in fact, the number of
autonomous political entities in the world may have almost
quadrupled, from 55 in 1900 to 192 in 1999 (Graber 2004).
Economic convergence may be the long-term rule, but perhaps the SRES was correct to conclude that economic stasis
or divergence is just as likely over the shorter term?

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American Anthropologist Vol. 116, No. 3 September 2014

This conclusion seems unlikely. The political events of

the 20th centuryand, arguably, the collapse of civilizations in other centuries, too (McAnany and Yoffee 2010)
were hardly as transformational as terms like collapse or a
quadrupling in polity numbers suggest, and their economic
effects were less dramatic yet. The political changes of the
20th century involved political realignments and reorganization but not massive political and economic disintegrations
or systemic devolution. Leaders, governmental forms, and
balances of power changed, but centralized organs of governance persisted. Networks of relationships that connected
these institutions to one another and to foreign powers were
often radically redrawn, but they were not erased. Concomitantly, although these changes clearly had economic
implications, economic structures and organizations largely
remained in place, with only limited effects on per capita
economic productivity and global economic convergence.
The effects of these disruptions on global economic
convergence were also diluted by those political entities
that did not fracture over the course of the 20th century
but, rather, continued their systemic expansion and integration. Furthermore, the century saw numerous supranational political and military blocs emerge and expand: the
League of Nations, the United Nations, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Peace
and Security Council, and a host of other alliances. On this
supranational scale, in fact, the number of political blocs or
federations in the world dropped from 55 in 1900 to just
four in 1999 (Graber 2004:153). At the economic level, in
the meantime, innovations in automobile and air travel and
in electronic communications vastly expanded the international economic institutions and global economic integration
that the SRES saw as promoting economic convergence. In
recent decades, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and numerous other trade blocs have arisen and
expanded. Business corporations have moved from national
to multinational platforms, with some seemingly on the
verge of transcending national boundaries altogether. The
results are as we might predict. Despite the imperial collapses that characterized the latter half of the 20th century,
Maddisons data (2007:382) show inter-regional spreads in
global per capita GDP slowly converging from 21.3:1 in
1950 to 18.2:1 in 2006.
Concerned with credibility issues, SRES authors stressed
that none of their scenarios should be considered a most
likely, central, or best-guess scenario (Nakicenovic and
Swart 2000:11). All are equally valid, they explained, with
no assigned probabilities of occurrence (Nakicenovic and
Swart 2000:4). They acknowledged that past scenario work
predominantly favored a globalization storylinea convergent futurebut they defended their equal weighting of
the A2 and B2 storylines on the basis that some scenario work
projected the reverse (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000:173).
This studied neutrality, David Groves and Robert
Lempert (2007:74) complain, did a disservice to policy mak-

FIGURE 3. Estimated CO2 emissions and SRES marker scenarios, 2000

2010. (Note: Annual industrial CO2 emissions in gigatons of carbon per

year [GtC yr1] for 20002010 [black dots] fall between the A1B and
B1 Marker Scenarios [CDIAC 2013; Manning et al. 2010; Nakicenovic
and Swart 2000].)

ers, the media, and the public because it suggested that future
growth in GGEs and global warming would as likely be minimal as it would be dire. Placing the SRES scenarios within
an anthropological and archaeological understanding of the
processes driving economic development also suggests it was
a mistake. Although we cannot be certain that convergence
will characterize the remainder of the 21st century, this
background knowledge indicates it is far more probable than
not. Absent an asteroid strike, a thermonuclear holocaust,
an abrupt climate change, or some other global catastrophe of the kind that the SRES explicitly excluded from
their modeling, emissions scenarios based on the A1 and B1
storylinesthose that foresee economic convergenceare
more realistic than those developed from the A2 and B2
storylines, which envision economic stasis or divergence.
This conclusion, as it happens, finds support in CO2
emissions over the decade since the SRESs projections first
appeared (Figure 3). Between 2000 and 2010, emissions
were in line with the A1 and B1 rather than the A2 and B2
marker scenarios, a finding thrown into even-starker relief
because the SRES was charged with assuming the counterfactual that no climate mitigation efforts would be enacted
during this period.
A CONSUMING ISSUE: STATUS COMPETITION AS
A DRIVER OF GGES

The global convergencedivergence issue demonstrates how

even basic anthropological and archaeological knowledge
could have improved the SRESs emissions projections. In
this and the next section of this article, I consider how further
cross-cultural and transtemporal research might inform the

Roscoe Improving Climate-Change Models

second key uncertainty in its modeling: the degree to which

a 21st-century world will emphasize affluence and economic
growth over environmental sustainability, or vice versa. In
this section, I focus on the dynamics of economic growth and
on how a better understanding of status competition (variously referred to also as status rivalry, status seeking, envy
provocation, and contests for position) and its role in human
affairs could improve our ability to forecast (and perhaps
mitigate) the growth and spread of consumerism, one of
the more environmentally destructive drivers of economic
growth. In the next section, I briefly consider research that
would inform our capacity to model attitudes to climatesensitive sustainability initiatives.
Consumerism is arguably the most potent driver of anthropogenic GGEs: it is so powerful, Richard Wilk warns,
that we risk consuming ourselves to death (2009; see also
Wilk 1997). The key question, Wilk observes, is this:
What makes human wants and needs grow? How do things that were
once distant luxuriessay, hot waterbecome basic necessities
that people expect on demand for civilized life . . . ? Air conditioning in personal automobiles, an expensive and uncommon option
just twenty years ago, is now standardeven on cars sold north of
the Arctic Circle in Norway! Why do Western consumers expect
their standard of living to keep rising? [2009:268, emphasis in
original]

Anthropology, Wilk continues, is well positioned to grapple with these questions because it provides the scope and
sweep of time to step back and offer a bigger picture of
how the human species got itself into its present dilemma of
rapid growth in greenhouse gas emissions (2009:268; see
also Mullins 2011).
If we knew why wants and needs grow over time,
it would clearly enhance our ability to predict future
growth in global economic and GGE rates. Unfortunately,
even the terms themselveswants and needscarry staggeringly complex philosophical baggage (see, e.g., Rayner and
Malone 1998: ch. 3). Not least, they are polyvalent in everyday language, referring among other things to both the
desires experienced by an agent and the goods and services
perceived as satisfying those desires. Adopting the latter usage, however, we may observe that wants and needs vary
in their expansionary dynamics: some increase at a faster
rate than others, with more serious implications for climate
change if their production, consumption, and disposal generates GGEs.
In industrialized nations, desires for existential wants
and needs such as food and water and utilitarian desires for goods and services such as hot water and airconditioning have clearly increased over time. However,
status competitionthe impulse to maintain social-political
standing (keeping up with the Joneses in Western culture), to achieve superior status or prestige (keeping ahead
of the Joneses), or bothprovokes wants and needs that
are intrinsically more vulnerable to inflation (Kempton and
Payne 1997). One can consume only so much water, food,
heating, cooling, and other existential and utilitarian goods

541

and services, but one can never have enough of those commodities that confer status. If status comes from taking heads,
distributing pigs, or possessing luxury cars or private jets,
for instance, each additional or higher quality head, pig,
or extravagant vehicle has as much value or more than the
previous one. If esteem comes from ritual purity, each additional quantum of pureness is asor morevaluable than
the last and so on. Even if the aim is only to keep up with the
Joneses rather than outdo them, status competition guarantees its own intensification: as others catch up with them,
the Joneses are motivated to ratchet up the stakes, priming
the cycle to repeat and expanding the level of commodities
required to satisfy status aspirations.
All of this would matter little to climate change if the
satisfaction of status aspirations had negligible effects on
GGEsand for most contemporary and past societies, this
is (or was) the case. In many aquatically adapted lowland
communities of contact-era New Guinea, for instance, headhunting was the dominant mode of male status competition,
but its impact on GGEs was negligible and possibly even negative given its effects on regional population levels. Other
modes of status competition have only modestly greater
GGE implications. Among the Northern Abelam of New
Guinea, males produced (largely inedible) long yams to gain
status, but the forest area cleared and burnedand hence
the GGEs generatedwere no more than about 12 percent
of that required for subsistence production (Lea 1964:96).
Matters are very different in the Anglo-American world,
wherein the principal mode of status competition is conspicuous consumption. The GGEs generated by this mode
of status competition are all but impossible to estimate:
quite apart from the gargantuan scale of the accounting
required, there is the methodological difficulty of differentiating status-related and nonstatus consumption desires.
Suffice it to say, the per capita GGEs that consumerism
generates dwarf those associated with status competition
in small-scale societies. Consumer societies chew through
resources at intensifying velocities as fashions and trends
in clothes, cars, household appliances, interior decoration,
and so onresult in the disposal of many goods long before their utilitarian life is over. This improvidence likely
accounts for a sizeable chunk of the difference in per capita
GGEs (measured as CO2 equivalent for 2005) between the
United States and Canada (26 tons) and Europe (11 tons),
on the one hand, and South Asia (3 tons), Africa (4 tons),
and Latin America (8 tons), on the other hand (Pachauri and
Reisinger 2007:37).
Sociology and psychology have both identified the
dynamics of status competition in consumerist society
as an important area for future climate change research
(APA 2010:3740; Nagel et al. 2009:15, 47, 87), and
anthropology and archaeology are uniquely positioned to
advance these enquiries. As Wilk observes, we have already amassed magnificent cross-cultural and long-term
data on human societies that can be used to think synthetically about the problem of growth and consumption

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American Anthropologist Vol. 116, No. 3 September 2014

(Wilk 2009:269). Combining this databank with further

targeted archival, archaeological, and ethnographic investigations, we can address four issues critical to forecasting
(and perhaps mitigating) future climate change.
First, we need to clarify the terminological thicket that
surrounds the concepts of status and status competition.
It is far from clear whether terms such as status, reputation, dominance, distinction, prestige, fame, symbolic capital,
and so on should be treated as synonyms for a single phenomenon or (more probably) as referents to more than one
(e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Henrich and Gil-White 2001:166
167; Hill 1984). Second, we need to consider the following question: Why do humans manifest status competition?
Ethnographic reports suggest that some form of status and
status competition are either universal or nearly so. If this
is so, what role do they play in human life? To what extent is the pursuit of status an enculturated (and therefore
potentially labile) trait as opposed to a genetically encoded
(and therefore less flexible) behavior? Social scientists have
devoted a lot of attention to these questions, but as yet
there is little agreement on answers (but see, e.g., Alexander 1987; Bliege Bird and Smith 2005; Henrich and GilWhite 2001; Panchanathan and Boyd 2004; Riches 1984;
Roscoe 2009:103105; von Rueden et al. 2011). Third,
we must explore these queries: How has status competition
evolved in the course of human history, and what conditions
intensify or moderate it? The pursuit of status appears to
intensify with the scale of social and political systems, but
this trend has yet to be empirically confirmed or explained.
Currently, very little empirical or analytical attention
has been paid to the fourth issue, the one most relevant to
climate change: Why is status competition refracted into different forms in different societiesheadhunting, as opposed
to pig production, as opposed to consumerism? Ethnographic
evidence indicates that, in any one community, humans may
accrue status through a range of channels, but a subset of these
invariably receives particular cultural emphasis. Material distributions and warriorhood, for instance, seem to be especially prominent pursuits in small-scale societies (Hayden
and Villeneuve 2011; Roscoe 2000:8991); consumerism is
the favored channel in U.S. and European nations. Why do
different communities emphasize different avenues to status?
Within a community, moreover, what determines an individuals pursuit of one mode rather than another? Although
conspicuous consumption dominates the pursuit of status in
the United States, for instance, some citizens nonetheless abjure consumption, pursuing status through spiritual avenues
or competing to be seen as environmentally conscious.2
Answers to these questions are of intrinsic value to anthropology and archaeology, but consumerism is so potent a
driver of GGEs that they are particularly important if we are
to robustly model the human dimensions of climate-change
prediction. A robust theory of the conditions under which
consumerism becomes a dominant mode of status competition would substantially improve our ability to forecast
whether and at what pace consumerism, economic growth,

and GGE production will spread under the forces of globalization (Wilk 1997). It could also illuminate the dynamics
and climate implications of an entirely new phenomenon: the
globalization of status competition. In the last few decades,
mechanisms of time-space compression have expanded the
sphere of competition from national to global scales, with the
potential to intensify vastly both status competition (e.g., by
placing elaborate homes around the world) and economic
growth rates.
As a further benefit, a solid theory of status might illuminate ways of channeling consumerism and other GGEintensive modes of status competition into less atmospherically damaging forms (though see Isenhour 2012 for a
Swedish example of the challenges involved). For the same
status increment, for instance, collecting artwork produces
fewer GGEs than possessing a Hummer or a private jet. Such
a project has to be sensitive to class issues: academic elites,
who traffic in cultural capital themselves, must be careful
to avoid treating materialism as a vulgar form of statusclaiming (Holt 2000:246248). Even so, psychological research does seem to show that materialistic valuesI shop,
therefore I am, as the ironic slogan has itcan be detrimental to measures of subjective well-being. Policies to reduce
consumerist-driven status competition therefore could have
payoffs not only for the planet but also for consumerist
agents themselves (APA 2010:3740; see also Kempton and
Payne 1997).
THE IDEOLOGICAL CLIMATE

The second key uncertainty generating the SRESs four

storylines was concerned not just with rates of global economic growth in the 21st century but also with whether
and to what degreethe world would balance that growth
against concerns with environmental sustainability. Having
briefly reviewed archaeological and anthropological research
that could illuminate the former, I turn now to research that
might advance our understanding of the latter. What shapes
attitudes toward environmental sustainability in general and
toward climate sustainability in particular?
The SRESs terms of reference stipulated that its scenarios should not take into account future GGE mitigation
initiatives, the idea being to establish baseline global warming forecasts against which to measure the effectiveness of
future climate policies. In referring to the value that a future
world might place on environmental sustainability, in other
words, the report had in mind protection of the environment in general, not the atmosphere in particular. With the
pending transition to RCPs, however, scenario development
will now include climate mitigation policies (a change that
was central, in fact, to favoring normative over explorative
scenarios in the forthcoming reports [Inman 2011]).
Whether aimed at the environment or the atmosphere,
current sustainability policies remain dismayingly blind to
cultural difference. The IPCCs mitigation reports, for instance, seem to presume that political and technocratic elites
in the non-Anglo-American world will function as successful

Roscoe Improving Climate-Change Models

cultural brokers to enact climate policies developed primarily in Anglo-American cultural worlds. Even in Europe and
the United States, however, governing elites confront belief
and value systems that are unreceptive, if not hostile, to climate policies. An understanding of cultural schemalocal
understandings of the material and social worlds and how
they workis thus critical to sustainability efforts and, in
the case of climate, to forecasting future climate change.
To be effective, climate-mitigation policies have to engage the populations they target, which requires in turn that
they be tuned to local cultural models, their dynamics, and
how they shape perceptions of the environment and climate. For this to work, a population must recognize at a
minimum that (a) climate can potentially change; (b) human
actions can precipitate these changes; (c) human actions can
mitigate them; and (d) mitigation policies are viable and
legitimate. If a local cosmology fails to validate even one
of these conditions, then a community will see no reason
to moderate its climate-changing activities. Despite exposure to media narratives that they may soon become climate
refugees, for instance, very few residents of Funafuti Atoll in
Tuvalu are reportedly interested in emigrating because of a
religious conviction that God will not break the promise He
made, following the Biblical deluge, never to flood the Earth
again (Mortreux and Barnett 2009:109110). Among U.S.
Evangelicals who acknowledge the reality of climate change,
attitudes are split between those who view mitigation as
ordained by Christs command to be proper stewards of
His creation and others who see climate change as a sign
of the End Times to be accepted or encouraged rather than
mitigated (Peifer et al. 2014). Cosmologies may also affect peoples responses to climate change. If climate change
proves abrupt or severe, many communities may locate the
causes in moral transgressions or apocalyptic prophesy and
the solutions in redemptive eschatology. These communities will probably not be enchanted with mitigation policies
advocating reductions in carboniferous fuel use.
The conclusions here are obvious. If climate mitigation
policies are to work, they must attend to local worldviews
in particular, how locals conceptualize climate, weather, and
their dynamics. Ethnographers have already amassed a large
quantity of ethnometeorological data on numerous communities around the world, and more recently anthropologists have conducted nuanced field research focused specifically on cultural models of climate (for reviews, see Adger
et al. 2012; Crate 2011). As noted earlier, though, most of
these studies are culture specific. We need now to collate,
systematize, and expand this information into a database,
which we can then use to generate an improved theoretical
understanding of ideological dynamics as they impinge on
the perception and production of climate change.
The dynamics of belief are by far the most intractable of
human phenomena to model, but they are no less important
to predicting and mitigating GGEs and climate change. At a
proximate level, the climate-denial industry in the United
States provides a graphic instance of how vested interests,

543

power, and media control can manipulate perceptions of climate change. These efforts have only succeeded, however,
because they take account of, and capitalize on, pre-existing
ideological systems. Efforts to predict and manage climate
change need to follow suit, but currently we have almost no
idea what parameters might affect a communitys ideological inclination to accept that climate can change and to be
motivated enough do something about it.
Ezra Markowitz and Azim Shariff (2012) have made a
useful start by identifying six characteristics of the human
moral judgement system that leave it poorly equipped to
identify climate change mitigation as a moral imperative.
Unfortunately, they argue from an assumption that the U.S.
moral judgment system exemplifies human moral judgment systems in general. Nevertheless, their research deserves cross-cultural expansion, not least to identify which
of these characteristics might indeed be generalizable, which
are culturally particular, and why. The cultural theory of
risk perception of Dan Kahan (2012) and his colleagues
(Kahan et al. 2011) provides a complementary starting
point. Drawing on the grid-group analytical frame that Mary
Douglas (1973; see also Douglas and Wildavsky 1982) originally deployed to understand the distribution of ancestor
cults, demons, and witchcraft in Africa, Kahan and colleagues analytical scheme seeks to map cultural worldviews,
connect them to cultural perceptions of hazards such as climate change, and promote collective management of these
risks.
It would be useful also to map and analyze the
sociopsychological contours of ethnometeorological systems. Which elements of these symbolic structures are core
or key (in the sense of critical to social or psychological
security), and which are more peripheral (in the sense of being secondary elaborations)? Answers would advance our
capacity to model and manage climate change in two ways.
Core beliefs and values may be more resistant to modification than peripheral ones. Attempts by policymakers to
revise them, therefore, may be fruitless, counterproductive, or even problematic in their sociopsychological consequences. Peripheral beliefs, in contrast, may be more labile
and their modification less detrimental to social and psychological well-being. In a future of demonstrable climate
change, core and peripheral beliefs may also provoke different responses. If dramatic temperature increases, sea-level
rise, and other physical disruptions impinge primarily on peripheral beliefs, climate change could reduce local resistance
to mitigation policy. Conversely, if they impinge on core beliefs, they may be more likely to provoke ideological crises
and apocalyptic or other responses that impede mitigation
and adaption efforts.
These are challenging issues, and it is unfortunate that
anthropology has shown a decreasing appetite in recent
years for general theorizing about the ideological realm,
the principal exceptions being in evolutionary psychology
and cognitive anthropology (e.g., Atran 2002; Boyer 2001;
Whitehouse 2004). There would seem to be scope, though,

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American Anthropologist Vol. 116, No. 3 September 2014

for elaborating and applying more mainstream anthropological theories to ethnometeorological systems, for example, theories that the body is a focal influence on human
perceptions of, and interactions with, the natural world
(Blacking 1977; Strauss and Orlove 2003:46). Changes
that modernity and globalization have provoked in these relationships (Besnier 2011) may provide a further, fruitful
area for investigation.
BACKCASTING TO THE FUTURE

As noted in the introduction to this article, we are at a

pivotal moment in emissions scenarios development, as the
top-down resource concentration pathways (RCPs) developed in the latest IPCC assessment reports displace the
bottom-up SRES approach deployed in the last two reports. This new approach stipulates four RCPspotential
emissions futureschosen to cover a wide range of possible emissions futures, and the challenge is to establish
what developments and policies might bend the emissions
future toward one pathway rather than another. One (controversial) pathway stipulates an immediate plateauing of
emissions, followed by a decline to zero by about 2080,
and then turning negative (i.e., meaning greenhouse gases
get pulled out of the atmosphere and locked away), a trajectory that would require extraordinary social changes and
the implementation of draconian policy measures to become
reality. At the other extreme, emissions trajectories are envisioned as almost quadrupling by 2080 before stabilizing
(Inman 2011:8). The challenge to achieving this future is
minimal: we do little or nothing to stop it.
Whatever RCP we focus on, we can only backcast the
developments and policies that would bring it into being
by using models of how human actions impinge on GGEs.
These will be provided by a set of so-called shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), currently in development. Later,
these models will be paired with sets of mitigation and adaptation policy scenarios (shared policy assumptions) to match
particular greenhouse gas trajectories (the RCPs). The SSPs
are intended to capture not only the dynamics of human
emissions activities but also the socioeconomic capacities of
different societies for climate-change mitigation and adaptation (Kriegler et al. 2012; ONeill et al. 2014). They will
also seek to incorporate processes omitted from the SRES,
such as urbanization rates and economic inequalities within as
well as among polities and regions. Nevertheless, in the early
stages of their development, the SSPs will still incorporate
the SRESs two core axes of uncertainty: The SRES developed four families of socioeconomic futures that span the
dimensions of globalized vs. regionalized development and
economic vs. environmental orientation. A similar specification of narratives for the SSPs will be needed in an early phase
of SSP construction (ONeill et al. 2014:397; see also Hallegatte et al. 2011:152154; Inman 2011:9). Thus, Elmar
Kriegler and colleagues (2012:815, 817) envision an economic dimension to the SSPs that would range from rapid
economic growth through a globalized economy on one end

of a continuum to modest economic growth based on localized systems on the other endthat is, convergence versus
stasis or divergence. They suggest that one SSP could represent a scenario involving rapid economic growth combined
with low investments in sustainability, while another refers
to a world in which investments were made in environmentally friendly processes (Kriegler et al. 2012:817)that is,
economic growth versus environmental concern. Different
SSPs, in other words, can be indexed to analogues in different
SRES marker scenariosnamely, A1T, A1FI, A2, and B1
(ONeill et al. 2014:398; see also Kriegler et al. 2012:817
818). The anthropological findings and research sketched in
this article, in other words, will be as relevant to developing
more sophisticated human models for future IPCC reports
as they might have been in fortifying those of the past decade
and a half.
CONCLUSION

Managing climate change will be a protracted and disquieting

process. Devising and implementing effective policy is a
drawn-out project to begin with, and in the case of climate
change, mitigation and adaptation measures are only likely to
pay off in the long run, even if they prove effective. If climate
change is indeed an existential challenge for the whole
human race (Ban 2012), then we surely need a research
program of Manhattan Project proportions and urgency on
the human dimensions of climate change.
In this article, I have sought to make clear that the
economic models of humanity currently used to assess and
manage the threat of climate change do not alone provide
a sufficiently robust basis for predicting (or backcasting)
climate trends. I have tried to illustrate with three examples
how anthropological and archaeological research, with its
integrative and universalist approach to social analysis, has
the potential to improve these trends.
For practical reasons, these examples have focused on
emissions scenarios used to date and on the two axes of
uncertainty that have played an outsized role in structuring the IPCCs emissions scenarios: (1) economic convergence versus divergence and (2) economic growth versus
environmental concern. The recent transformations of the
IPCCs modeling efforts notwithstanding, these axes will
remain important elements of emissions modeling in the
immediate future. There are many other ways, however,
in which archaeological and anthropological research could
reduce uncertainties in the models. Archaeological and urban anthropological research could greatly improve the poor
understanding we currently have of the rates at which urbanization progresses, a crucial variable in establishing the
impact on GGEs of population growth, land use, transportation patterns, and resource use (Rosa and Dietz 2012:3).
Cross-cultural work on the political, social, and ideological dimensions of reproductive decision making can help
predict and in some measure perhaps mitigate the GGE
implications of future population growth. An anthropological understanding of what affects perceptions of time could

Roscoe Improving Climate-Change Models

enhance our capacity to model the valuation of time relative

to natural resources and the consequences for environmental
preservation (APA 2010:39). Anthropology could also do a
lot to improve the cultural resolution of global projection
and mitigation modeling. Current IPCC models aggregate
nation-state data into regional blocs, but even scaling at a
nation-state level is questionable in the case of postcolonial nations, which commonly encompass multiple ethnic
and cultural groupings within artificially imposed political
boundaries.
Anthropological and archaeological research also has a
great potential to complexify the IPCCs modelsthat
is, to insert elements that current scenarios simply fail to
take into account. These include the intricate, transnational
teleconnections that constrain and shape local, national, and
international distributions and trajectories of development
and consumption, as well as the GGE implications of intrapolity economic inequalities (though there are indications
that the new SSPs attempt to address this issue [ONeill
et al. 2014:396]).
There are a number of points at which such findings
can be fed into future climate-change modeling efforts.
The first is the generative phase in which scenarios are
first envisioned, collected, and harmonized (Borjeson
et al. 2006:730733). Anthropologists and archaeologists
were conspicuously absent from the tables at which the
IPCCs emissions scenarios were initially generated, and it
is unclear to what degree the shift to RCPs will allow them
to be radically reworked. If and when they are, however,
anthropology and archaeology can do a lot to increase their
robustness.
A second, tailor-made point of integration is to use
anthropological and archaeological findings to refine and
reduce the uncertainties associated with the narratives on
which scenarios are based. What we know about the social,
economic, and political dynamics of human societies, for instance, indicates that economic convergence is considerably
more probable than stasis or divergence. Anthropological
and archaeological research on the dynamics of status competition may resolve major uncertainties over whether and
in what degree non-Western nations will emulate Western
consumerism (Wilk 1997). Together with a better knowledge of what kinds of ideological systems favor environmental protection and what ones do not, these findings could
significantly narrow the uncertainties associated with the
SRESs second scenario axis: the degree to which, as the future unfolds, nations will balance economic growth against
environmental concerns.
In developing the new SSPs, in sum, researchers may
be able to de-emphasizeor even discardsome pathways
while weighting others more heavily, producing a more
robust suite of models. Finally, to the extent that some archaeological and anthropological findings can be rendered
as quantitative, qualitative, or dummy variables, they can
be directly incorporated into the mathematical foundations
of the IPCCs models. In short, a changing climate for anthropological and archaeological research is important to the

545

relevance of our disciplines, but it could offer even more to

the future of humanity.
Paul
of

Roscoe

Maine,

Orono,

Department

of

ME,

Paul.Roscoe@umit.maine.edu;

04473;

Anthropology,

University

http://umaine.edu/anthropology/faculty-staff/jim-roscoe/

NOTES
Acknowledgments.

For assistance or comments on previous

drafts of this article, I am most grateful to Ulrike Claas, Cindy
Isenhour, and Kirk Maasch. I also warmly thank several anonymous
reviewers for their time, effort, and telling comments. I especially
appreciate Michael Chibniks guidance and wise counsel. None of
these people, be it noted, bears any responsibility for the errors and
idiocies I have surely perpetrated.
1. The paradoxical effect of this incorporative process is that economic inequalities between the global rich and the worlds poor
can increase even as the worlds economies converge. This is
because differences in per capita economic productivity among
polities are replaced by economic inequalities within polities,
producing an increment of economic convergence in terms of the
relevant SRES metric.
2. Beyond profligate conspicuous consumption fueled by their financial activities, for instance, insider traders on Wall Street
reportedly vie to outdo one another through their control of
information: The more information you have, the more in the
know you are, the more youre the master of the universe (Cohan
2011).

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