| There is a disruptive uncertainty surrounding today's climatic changes which confronts Western interdisciplinary science with a situation where it continues to increase knowledge, but barely narrows the range of uncertainty. With over 80 percent of post-industrial greenhouse gas emissions originating from Western nations, much of this scientific uncertainty is intertwined with the political economics, beliefs and behaviours of this culture. The global scale of this Western climatic uncertainty is also disrupting other cultural knowledges, such as Inuit who have found their northern ecology, knowledge and lives compromised by largely far-removed Western actions. Because these northern changes are important for understanding changes in the global climate system, scientists have engaged dialogues with Inuit ecological knowledge at the same time that the integrity of this cultural knowledge is challenged. The West's climatic uncertainty seems to be proliferating both interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogues. While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's interdisciplinarity and the Kyoto Protocol's internationalism are symbolic of this trend, they ultimately limit the range of intercultural and historical voices heard due to the continuation of Western assumptions that are intertwined with the onset of these climatic changes. In following the implications of interdisciplinanty into intercultural dialogues with Inuit and into an alternative Western view on historical climate changes (e.g. Medieval Warming Period, Little Ice Age), this dissertation proposes that today's changes primarily challenges the West to re-orient its historically lengthy beliefs, fossil fuel behaviours and responses towards a capacity for socializing with the climate system's complex processes. |
