One of the issues in recent sociological debate on the assessment of global environmental change (GEC) has been the question how to determine the relevant domain of sociological enquiry. In this article I try to provide an insight into this question by looking at some of the conditions which enable us to identify the formation and acceleration of GEC as a phenomenon that is deeply rooted in the social and political development of modernity. In discussing the social origins of GEC, I identify four distinct forces of GEC, each of them amplified by the process of globalization. Next I present an analysis of climate change as an example of a GEC process, in which I show that, although the forces of modernization seem to be helpless in the face of a process of such magnitude, we still tend to rely on them to provide solutions to the problems they are responsible for generating.
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