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(Still) Disagreeing About Climate Change: What Way Forward?

Mike Hulme

www.mikehulme.org mike.hulme@kcl.ac.uk

Professor of Climate and Culture, Department of Geography

STEPS Public Lecture , University of SussexWednesday 13 May 2015

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“Global warming and global cooling are physical phenomenon. But the battle over these real or presumed developments is a cultural and social phenomenon. In this sense at least history and meteorology go hand-in-hand.”

Lucien Boia (2005) in Weather in the Imagination

The idea of climate change

“... the phrase ‘climate change’ mobilises very different sets of ideologies, meanings, values and

goals ... it means different things to different people in different contexts, places and networks”

Mike Hulme (2009) in …

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Reasons to disagree

• Role of Science

• Economics

• Religious belief

• Risk perceptions

• Communication

• Development

• Governance “A good place to look for wisdom is where you least expect to find it … in the minds of your opponents”

(Jonathan Haidt, 2006)

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(1) Climate risks are underdetermined by science

(2) Acting in the world is about judgement rather than facts -- ‘nature’ can never be our moral guide

(3) Goals will be multivariate and conflicting

(4) Investing in the pre-conditions for making ‘the world we want’ takes priority (means before ends)

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Outline of the lecture

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Climate risks are underdetermined by science

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(1) -- The dangers of climate reductionism

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The dangers of ‘consensus’

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“Characterising climate change as a challenge in managing risks opens doors to a wide range of options for solutions” (Chris Field, 2014)

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Climate change as ‘risk’

The idea of ‘risk’ -- with its attendant uncertainties and subjectivities -- opens the space for different ethical, political and economic judgements to be

made about different courses of action to ameliorate or tolerate these risks

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‘(1) science will compel a convergence of people’s worldviews around the need to take action …

(2) … action to mean reducing greenhouse gas emissions to minimize human disturbance of the global climate system’

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Challenging ‘The Plan’

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(2) -- Motivated by science?

“All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by … an understanding

of the science of climate change” [R K Pachauri, 2 November 2014]

... called for ‘decisive political action’ on climate change on the basis of ‘what we know’

... but this begged the question about how competing human political and ethical values are to be reconciled for determining what that ‘decisive action’ should be

2014 Annual Meeting

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What science requires of us … ?

What climate change requires of us cannot be read from the pages of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report ... there is

no ‘moral guide’ from nature

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Judging the facts

Each individual has to pass judgement on the facts before they can act politically in the world ...

“The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this [or that] direction and this question cannot be determined by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians”

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Climate change might usefully be seen as a synecdoche (or metonymy) – a figure of speech by

which a part is put for the whole

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Climate change as synecdoche

This is partly reflected in my suggestion about distinguishing

between lower case – climate change – and upper case – Climate Change

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“Risk society means that the past is losing its power of determination of the present. It is being replaced by the future, that is to say,

something non-existent, fictitious and constructed, as the basis for present-day action … Expected risks are the whip to keep the

present in line. The more threatening the shadows that fall on the present because a terrible future is impending, the more believed are

the headlines provoked by the dramatisation of risk today.”

Climate change as risk society

Beck, 1997

‘threatening shadows of the future’

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“Not long ago we knew the best time for planting seeds … when the leaves would turn deep orange, when to look forward to building

snowmen. Things like the cuckoo’s dependable call would be a sign that spring had come. There

was a kind of certainty to our lives …

But the cuckoo’s are disappearing and it seems all the patterns of the world are being scrambled ... For the first time in human history the ability of

our planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted”

Camp for Climate Action newspaper, 2008, ‘You are here’

Climate change as loss of ‘nature’

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“Those of us fighting for change should ensure that we mount a political battle against the climate sceptics, not simply a scientific

one … the real enemy is the capitalist system, which puts profit before the lives of billions of humans and the planet … the real allies

in this fight [are] the millions of working people around the world who have no vested interest in a system that prioritises profit over

the world’s climate.”

Climate change as ideology

Suzanne Jeffrey, 4 January 2011 International Socialism

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Climate change as Anthropocene

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(3) -- Many goals

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Conflicting goals

Luers & Sklar (2014) “.. the focus on a single target [2 degrees] has become an obstacle [to effective policy-making] because it ... frames climate change as a distant abstract threat and fails

to recognise the diversity of values and risk perceptions of people around the world”

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“Gathering priorities of people from every corner of the world, this project will build a collective vision that will be used directly by the UN and World Leaders to plan a new development agenda launching in 2015, one that is based

on the aspirations of all citizens!”

(4) -- So what way forward?

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“WWViews embodied and projected not only a passive form of scientific citizenship, but also an image of the citizen shorn of any meaningful geographical, cultural, or political particularity”

[Blue & Medlock, 2014]

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Disciplined citizens

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The world we ‘must’ have?

Governments must ...

The carbon budget must ...

We need to …

Every country must ...

We must unleash …

We need a strategy …

We must safeguard sinks …

We must realise …

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The Earth League Vision –‘scientists speaking with one voice’

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The pre-conditions for ‘the world we want’

- The place of science

- Political institutions

- Spaces of encounter

- Virtuous characters

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Putting science in its place

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“Is there a contradiction between the world of the Anthropocene and democracy? The Anthropocene, with its associated concepts of

planetary boundaries and ‘hard’ environmental threats and limits, encourages a focus on clear single goals and solutions. It is co-

constructed with ideas of scientific authority and incontrovertible evidence; with the closing down of uncertainty or at least its reduction

into clear, manageable risks and consensual messages” (Melissa Leach, 2013)

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‘passing political judgement on the facts’

… the conditions of trust that allow different voices to be heard, the

powerful to be held accountable …

… to make public judgement possible

Political institutions

Theocracy where Religion is dominantAutocracy where Power is dominantTechnocracy where Science is dominant

cf.Democracy where agonistic debate is dominant

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Spaces of encounter

“Encountering disagreement in one’s social network is a good thing … it promotes participation and a number of civically-relevant outcomes”

(http://bigthink.com/ideas/41613?page=all Dietrum Scheufele and Matt Nisbet)

But what is the effect of the internet and new social media ... to close informational divides or to reinforce partisan divides?

• opening up a new world of easily accessible scientific information to lay audiences with just a few clicks?

• or narrowing our informational choices by how search engines present results and direct traffic?

The dangers of ‘echo-chambers’ and ‘information cocoons’

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Virtuous characters

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Virtuous circles

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ScripturePractices

ExamplesCommunity

Stories

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Virtuous circles

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Faith/Reason/Evidence

Practices

ExamplesCommunity

Stories

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‘A world brought into being in the right way, not a world engineered from above to a pre-determined outcome’

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Professor Mike Hulmewww.mikehulme.orgmike.hulme@kcl.ac.uk

wires.wiley.com/climatechange