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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
The changing climate poses serious dangers to human and non-human life alike, though perhaps the most urgent danger is one we hear very little about: the rise of climatism. Too many social, political and ecological problems facing the world today - from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the management of wildfires - quickly become climatized, explained with reference to 'a change in the climate'. When complex political and ethical challenges are so narrowly framed, arresting climate change is sold as the supreme political challenge of our time and everything else becomes subservient to this one goal. In this far-sighted analysis, Mike Hulme reveals how climatism has taken hold in recent years, becoming so pervasive and embedded in public life that it is increasingly hard to resist it without being written off as a climate denier. He confronts this dangerously myopic view that reduces the condition of the world to the fate of global temperature or the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to the detriment of tackling serious issues as varied as poverty, liberty, biodiversity loss, inequality and international diplomacy. We must not live as though climate alone determines our present and our future.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Notes
1 From Climate to Climatism
From climate to climate change
From climate to climatization
From climatization to climatism
Climatism as ideology
An example: disasters and climatism
Summary
Notes
2 How Did Climatism Arise?
Framing climate change
Summary
Notes
3 Are the Sciences Climatist?
The use and misuse of climate scenarios
Science and ideology
Asymmetrical evaluation of climate impacts
Communicating scientific uncertainties
Self-interested science
Summary
Notes
4 Why is Climatism So Alluring?
Climatism as master-narrative
Totalizing scope
Gnostic tone
Apocalyptic rhetoric
Manichean by design
Summary
Notes
5 Why is Climatism Dangerous?
The dangers of climatism
Mono-causal explanations
Discourse of scarcity
Depoliticizing the issue
Anti-democratic impulses
Perverse outcomes
Summary
Notes
6 If Not Climatism, Then What?
Antidotes against climatism
Foreground uncertainties about the climatic future
‘Technologies of humility’
There are no ‘cliff-edges’
Plurality of values
Summary
Notes
7 Some Objections
1. ‘Climate science is not alarmist’
2. ‘Climate change is an existential risk’
3. ‘Justice is much more central to climate change advocacy than you imply’
4. ‘If capitalist consumerism is to be challenged then maybe a counter-ideology such as climatism is needed’
5. ‘You sound just like a climate denier, a climate delayer or a Pollyanna, an excessively or blindly optimistic person’
Climate change is not a nail awaiting a hammer
Notes
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1
Schematic illustration of the relationship between climate, local socio-politica…
Figure 2
Schematic illustrations of hybrid disasters which recognize a more complex relat…
Figure 3
Schematic illustration of the relationship between climate, socio-political orga…
List of Table
Chapter 1
Table 1
Four characteristics of a ‘climate logic’ in the making, with associated expres…
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Climate Change isn’t Everything
Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism
Mike Hulme
polity
Copyright © Mike Hulme 2023
The right of Mike Hulme to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5617-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948540
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
The idea for this book slowly gestated during the years since 2018, which have witnessed a growing alarmist discourse surrounding climate change, fuelled by the rhetoric of ‘ten more years’ and a proliferation of ticking clocks. During these years, I published a few short essays and commentaries – in the academic literature as well as on my blog – which drew attention to some of the dangers of this alarmist rhetoric. My idea that what I was witnessing was the emergence of an ideology I call ‘climatism’ catalysed during 2021. Particularly helpful in this catalysis were stimulating discussions about many aspects of climate change conducted with my graduate reading group in Cambridge: David Durand-Delacre, Freddie Hartz, Maximilian Hepach, Anneleen Kenis, Noam Obermeister, Kari de Pryck and Tom Simpson. While thanking them for their challenges and provocations to my thinking, the line of argument I develop in this book is distinctly mine, not theirs. I also wish to acknowledge the perceptive, and mostly encouraging, remarks offered by three anonymous readers of, first, an outline proposal for the book, and then later a full draft version of the manuscript. My colleagues Shin Asayama, Rob Bellamy and Anneleen Kenis also offered valuable commentaries on a draft manuscript, and for this I am grateful. At Polity Press, I have benefited from the active support and advice of my editor Jonathan Skerrett. Notwithstanding the above, all opinions and judgements expressed here are my own.
Mike HulmeCambridge, December 2022
IntroductionCivil War, Racist Tweets and Flood Devastation
Following Friday prayers in the city’s mosques, public protests spilled onto the streets of Dara’a, a smallish city in southwest Syria. Sunni Muslims were protesting against the recent arrest and torture of schoolboys in the city, some as young as thirteen, perpetrated by President Assad’s security agents. These events happened in 2011, on Friday, 18 March; in the weeks that followed, protests against Assad’s regime – led by activists and public intellectuals – erupted in other cities around the country. The localized protests in Dara’a turned into a national uprising. Assad attempted to suppress the protests, often violently, but by September street-fighting between government troops and newly organized anti-government militias was a regular sight in several Syrian cities.1
This uprising seeded the Syrian civil war which, over the following twelve years, is estimated to have claimed half a million lives and led to untold suffering. Of Syria’s total population of 21 million, around 6 million were displaced internally by the war and a similar number were forced by the conflict to flee the country. As the fighting intensified, the number of Syrian refugees seeking asylum in Europe swelled, peaking at more than 30,000 asylum applications per month during the summer and autumn of 2015. At the same time, large numbers of additional refugees were arriving in Europe from Kosovo, Afghanistan, Albania and Iraq.
The resulting European migrant crisis of 2015 created major political ruptures across the continent as governments and opposition politicians reacted in different ways to the crisis. Many pointed to climate change to attribute blame for the fighting and the subsequent flow of refugees arriving in southeast Europe. Media headlines shouted, ‘Syria’s brutal four-year war blamed on CLIMATE CHANGE’, ‘Climate change opened “Gates of Hell” in Syria’ and ‘Climate change led to rise of Syrian terror’. These headlines fuelled a narrative which became widespread during 2015, and that has remained in circulation ever since: that the Syrian civil war was caused, at least in part, by human-caused climate change. This narrative ran as follows. A multi-year drought during the years 2006 to 2009, affecting most severely the agricultural areas of northeast Syria, was blamed on climate change. The ensuing crop failures displaced large numbers of agricultural labourers who sought employment in the towns and cities of western and southwestern Syria. These incoming rural migrants were then identified as the driver of subsequent political unrest in urban centres such as Dara’a. The Syrian civil war was thus a consequence of climate change.
This ‘Syrian war/climate change thesis’ attracted much attention. Barack Obama, the then United States President, claimed in May 2015 that climate change-related drought ‘helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war’, while a few months later the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, argued that ‘it’s not a coincidence that immediately prior to the civil war in Syria, the country experienced its worst drought on record’. In November 2015, the heir to the British throne, Prince Charles, announced that ‘there is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for five or six years’. Many other institutions and organizations argued similarly – the World Bank, Friends of the Earth, official governmental and intergovernmental reports, defence think-tanks, academics, activists, and commentators of various political persuasions.2
The claim that the Syrian civil war was triggered by climate change gained salience in the weeks leading up to the important international climate negotiations – COP21 – that took place in Paris in December that year. The claim circulated in news media, threaded its way through countless social media posts, and fuelled fears about ‘tides of climate migrants’ crossing borders. The European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, identified climate change as one of the ‘root causes’ of the new migration, with others suggesting that the displaced Syrians arriving in Europe were ‘climate migrants’ or ‘climate refugees’. Eighteen months later, in March 2017, former US Vice-President Al Gore even claimed that, as a consequence of these migrants, Britain’s vote in June 2016 to leave the European Union – the Brexit referendum – was ‘partly caused by climate change’.3
For its advocates, the Syrian war/climate change thesis was important for two reasons. It offered a climatic explanation for the events of 2015, suggesting that the triggering effects of climate change on human conflict and migration are already with us. But this thesis also presaged the future chaos that some believe will ensue as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. As President Obama argued in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, climate change will cause ‘more drought, more famine, more mass displacement, all of which will fuel more conflict for decades’. The common refrain amongst the military is that climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’. For those who argue that the number of migrants arriving in Europe will inevitably rise as the planet warms, the Syrian war/climate change thesis appeared as a harbinger of such a future, lending extra credibility to warnings of future climate-driven political instability.
Human-caused climate change is claimed to inflame conflict in other ways. A recent study has suggested that the volume of hate speech appearing on Twitter – content judged to be racist or xenophobic – is influenced by outdoor air temperature.4 The authors analysed daily temperature data together with more than 10 million racist tweets originating between 2012 and 2018, emanating from six different countries spanning several climate zones across Europe. Their data showed that the volume of racist tweets was inversely proportional to the temperature distribution. The number of racist tweets and ‘likes’ was lowest for daily average temperatures between 5°C and 11°C, a range sometimes referred to as a ‘climate comfort zone’. However, as the local daily average air temperature fell below 5°C and, even more so, as it rose above 11°C, the frequency of racist content increased steeply. The authors offered no causal explanation for this finding, but they claimed that their result showed that ‘the occurrence and acceptance of racist content online could increase’ in the future because the climate of Europe will get warmer. Within the next thirty years the number of days outside this climate comfort zone will increase across parts of the continent, suggesting to these authors that rising temperatures would aggravate xenophobia and racism in social media.
Climate change is also believed to cause other forms of devastation beyond war, migration and racist speech. Over a few days in the middle of July 2021, a month’s rainfall fell over the Eifel Mountains of western Germany, near the border with Belgium and Luxembourg. The small river Kyll, and others like it, became raging torrents, and several riverside towns in the border area of Germany and Belgium were inundated. More than 200 people were killed across the region, and billions of euros of damage caused, in what was deemed the worst flood disaster in western Europe for several decades. Scientists pointed to the fact that a warmer atmosphere due to greenhouse gases had made such intense rainfall more likely. Many politicians blamed climate change for the disaster. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, toured the affected region and claimed that the world had ‘to move faster in the battle against climate change’.5
*
What connects a destructive civil war in Syria, a rising volume of racist tweets, and devastating flood damage in Germany? It is the idea of climate change as a causal agent of adverse events. In each of these three cases, climate change was offered as the pre-eminent or decisive factor that ‘explained’ the troubling social outcomes described. These causal narratives are deployed by leading public figures, advocates and campaigners to urge a more vigorous ‘battle against climate change’, to stop climate change ‘within ten years’. The implication of this framing – even if not always explicitly stated – is that if one wishes to reduce the likelihood of wars, the rise of racist tweets, the misery of flood damage, then limiting the future rate of climate change would be an effective way of doing so.
It is a line of thinking and argumentation that is alluring and which indisputably has become more widespread in recent years. But it’s a way of thinking that’s also dangerous. It draws attention to one set of realities – those related to humanity’s ongoing activities which are re-shaping the world’s climates – and elevates them to a universal explanation for all the world’s ills. It identifies changing physical climatic conditions, but isolates them from the many local and regional contextual factors that condition the way in which meteorological events interact with historical, social, political, cultural, economic and ecological systems. This way of thinking ignores – or at least very seriously underplays – another, more complex, set of realities which condition the way the world works and, indeed, which condition the nature of the world’s changing climate and the impacts it has on ecosystems, societies and people.
So, to take in turn the examples offered above: Rather than being caused by a severe drought in northeast Syria attributable to human emissions of greenhouse gases, the civil war in Syria was much more deeply rooted in that country’s long history of ethnic tensions and political grievances exacerbated by President Assad’s economic and social policies. The reasons why people promote racist tweets have much more to do with the changing modes and cultural norms of digital communication and with political influences on xenophobic attitudes than they have to do with the temperature outside people’s windows. The flooding in the valleys of Germany’s Eifel Mountains and the damage this caused was as much a result of changing land use in the upper catchments of these rivers – the spread of farms, the removal of natural vegetation, the expansion of impermeable surfaces – as it was a result of very intense rainfall. Mere association – or in some cases statistical correlation – between a climatic event and a deleterious outcome is not evidence of primary or even significant causation.
Limiting the rate of climate change over the next thirty or more years is a desirable long-term policy goal, but it should not be mistaken for interventions to prevent wars, defuse racism or contain flooding. For these, and for many other examples, there are better and faster ways to alleviate deleterious outcomes than to wait thirty or more years for global warming to be arrested. If one is concerned about the rise of racist tweets, the most effective way of tackling this is unlikely to be doubling-down on carbon dioxide emissions today: the avoided warming – and hence any putative defusing of the impulse to tweet racism – will not be realized for at least thirty years.
The purpose of this book is to warn against the allure of blaming everything on climate. It is to suggest that ‘stopping climate change’ might not always be the best way of stopping things from getting worse. It argues instead for placing whatever explanatory power climate change has for influencing affairs in the world into a much wider context. It argues that climate change isn’t the only thing matters; it may not always be the most important. And it argues that doing everything one can, at all costs, to ‘stop climate change’ might at times even be a distraction from doing the things that really do make a difference.
*
Just over ten years ago, in 2011, I published an article in Osiris, a leading history of science journal: ‘Reducing the future to climate: a story of climate determinism and reductionism’.6 There, I introduced the term ‘climate reductionism’ to describe a particular way of thinking about the future which had gained ground in previous years. Climate reductionism, so I argued, imagined the future solely through the predictions of climate science, as though climate alone will determine the human future. I pointed out the deficiencies and the dangers of this way of thinking. The article has become the most cited in the journal’s forty-year history.
Now, more than a decade later, a new variant of climate reductionism has taken hold. A way of thinking has gained a following that reduces not only the future to climate, but the present also. Contemporary politics is being reduced to the pursuit of a single overarching goal: to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by a given date, whether 2030, 2050 or whenever. By elevating this objective of political action in the world above all others, by making all other political goals subservient to this one, a dangerously myopic view of political, social and ecological well-being is being created. Whereas ten years ago I was concerned about how climate reductionist thinking was limiting our imagination of the future, I am now concerned about how it is constraining the politics of the present.
Climate reductionism has turned into a fully fledged ideology, an ideology I call ‘climatism’. Climatism grows out of climate reductionism, but is more pervasive and insidious. At the same time, it is also more subtle and harder to isolate. At its most extreme, climatism uses the idea of climate change to ‘naturalize’ the problems of the world. The problems facing the world – whether the triumph of the Taliban, the management of wildfires, Putin’s war in Ukraine, the movement of people – all become ‘climatized’.
This ‘naturalization’ of social outcomes is similar to how biological racial theory has been used in the past – and sometimes still is today. According to racist thinking, some people struggle academically ‘because’ they are black; others are good at mathematics ‘because’ they are east Asian. So also with climatism: Some countries’ economies underperform ‘because’ they have tropical climates; others go to war ‘because of’ climate change; people move ‘because of’ climate change; some people ‘like’ racist tweets ‘because’ it is hot outside; floods happen ‘because’ the rain is heavy. The instinct in common between climatism and racism is a desire to reduce understanding of the complexities of the world (whether human difference or social-ecological well-being) to a partial and incomplete scientistic project (whether biological race theory or climate modelling).
There are of course differences between climatism and racism, as I will make absolutely clear. Not least is the reality of human-caused climatic change. To some extent, this scientifically well-established fact ‘de-naturalizes’ the idea of climate. The effect of human influences on the climate system means that our climate can no longer be understood as simply ‘natural’. Climate has now to be understood as something which is – at least partly – human-shaped. The patterns of weather around the world are indeed different than they would be on a twin planet without human presence. This distinction between climate (as natural) and ongoing changes in climate (as largely human-caused) is subtle and hard to characterize. It is a distinction that is easily elided in popular thinking and political discourse.
And it leads to two mis-steps.
The first is that all meteorological events become understood as mere proxies for human agency, whether the ultimate source of that agency is nefarious (e.g. fossil-fuel interests) or more innocent (e.g. meat-eating consumers). Climate’s remaining ‘naturalness’ gets lost. Thus all hurricanes and heatwaves, for example, become viewed as manifestations of the behaviours of fossil-fuel companies, colonialism, capitalism, Amazonian loggers, rich meat-eaters or frequent flyers, forgetting that hurricanes and heatwaves are a natural feature of the world’s climates.
Which leads to the second mis-step. Rather than seeking to understand the politics of why the impacts of similar meteorological phenomena on social and ecological well-being are so different in different places, attention is directed solely to the politics of ‘stopping climate change’. This is a dangerous reduction in the scope of the political. To take hurricanes again as the example: the most pressing questions raised by the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans in August 2005 pertain to the politics of race, flood defence and urban planning, not to the politics of burning fossil carbon or cutting down tropical forests.
Now in case anyone misunderstands me at this point, let me be absolutely clear. Just because hurricanes and heatwaves are natural features of local climates does not mean human actions cannot alter their intensity and/or frequency. And just because the impacts of weather and climatic extremes are always mediated by local social, economic and political factors does not mean we should ignore the need to decarbonize our energy systems and to manage our forests and land in general more sustainably. By pointing out the ideology of climatism and its attendant dangers, as I do in this book, I am not dismissing the scientific evidence that human actions have already caused changes in climatic patterns, and will continue to do so. This evidence is crystal clear. Nor am I suggesting that efforts to mitigate climate change and to adapt to its effects are worthless or should be stopped. What I am doing in this book is arguing against the ideology of climatism with its narrow and reductionist field of view, and in favour of a more contextually sensitive, diverse and pragmatic approach to incorporating the challenges of climate change into everyday politics.
*
Let me now turn to offer a short outline of how the book is organized. Chapter 1 – ‘From Climate to Climatism’ – explains what climatism is. I make clear that climate matters for human affairs. Of course it matters. Climates shape the physical and cultural environments within which all human life is conducted. And I also make clear the indisputable fact that the world’s climates are changing in ways now significantly influenced by past and present human activities. That these climatic changes are afoot presents new and challenging contexts for human and non-human life alike.
But belief in these physical realities does not by itself constitute climatism.
No. Climatism becomes an ideology when it is held that the dominant explanation of social, political and ecological phenomena is ‘a change in the climate’, when complex political, social and ethical challenges become framed narrowly in terms of a changing climate. It becomes an ideology when these beliefs are held not just by assorted individuals, but when significant groups of people hold them to be self-evident social truths. The ideology of climatism claims that arresting climate change is the supreme political challenge of our time and that everything else becomes subservient to this one goal.
I argue that climatism, like other ‘-isms’, is an ideology, a body of doctrine, myth and belief that guides individuals, institutions, classes, cultures or social movements. But if climatism is an ideology, why is this a problem? Ideologies are not ‘wrong’ simply because they are ideologies. After all, ideologies would appear to be inevitable constructions of the human mind. They are systems of belief that seem necessary for animating and guiding purposeful collective human action in the world. Many ‘-isms’ are pernicious, for example racism, sexism, chauvinism or terrorism. But many are not, or at least not necessarily so. Think of impressionism, veganism, revivalism or syncretism.
By calling-out the ideology of climatism I am naming a way of thinking, arguing and acting in the world for what it is – a distinctive doctrine which, whilst providing animating power for some forms of political action, can also be self-justifying, discriminatory and oppressive. Climatism – as with other ideologies – is like a pair of tinted spectacles which colours how we see and interpret the world. Indeed, climatism is now so pervasive and embedded in many areas of public life that it is hard to recognize the spectacles we might be wearing. To expose climatism in our thought, speech and actions – and even more to challenge it – is to risk being seen to be undermining the reality of a changing climate or to be questioning the importance of taking climate into account when developing public policy.
But such undermining or questioning is not my aim. Arguing against the ideology of climatism does not mean arguing against the importance of climatic change for human affairs. Even less does it challenge the fact that humans are changing the climate. However, by challenging climatism I seek to free contemporary politics from two things. First, from the oppression of a scientized and deterministic view of the relationship between climate and society. And, second, from a dangerously myopic view that reduces the condition of the future world to the fate of global temperature or to the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The ideology of climatism has been constructed, and gained salience, gradually over the past forty years. In this development, it has been aided most significantly by a series of historical moves in the scientific and social scientific study of climate change. Ten such moves are elaborated in Chapter 2, ‘How Did Climatism Arise?’ These include the scientization of the study of climate, the adoption of global temperature as an object of policy, attempts to differentiate between human-caused and natural weather, and the claim that there are narrowing temporal windows within which change must be enforced, after which it will be ‘too late’. These epistemic developments have allowed an influential array of thinkers, advocates and activists to appropriate the science of climate change to do political work for them. This appropriation, I believe, is one of the hallmarks of climatism.
Identifying the scientific underpinnings of climatism leads me in Chapter 3 to ask the question, ‘Are the Sciences Climatist?’ Here, I point out the danger that the climate sciences may become distorted because of the ideology of climatism. At the very least, it is possible that covert and overt pressures tempt climate science to lend its weight to an overtly political agenda. Studying humans scientifically through the lens of ‘essentialized races’ would be called out as racism. Similarly, studying societies, regions and cultures scientifically through the lens of ‘essentialized climates’ – the idea that climates have independent physical form and material agency in society – can be called out as climatism. This has implications for the sciences. Resting one’s political and/or ethical arguments about how one acts in the world on a scientistic platform can lead to the authority of the underlying science being defended at all costs for fear of showing any weakness against one’s political adversaries. As I explain, this defensiveness is good neither for science nor for politics.
So why has climatism become so pervasive? In Chapter 4, ‘Why is Climatism So Alluring?’, I lay out a number of features of climatism that help explain its appeal and rise to prominence. First among these is that climatism offers a master-narrative about the present and future state of the world. It is one that is sufficiently all-embracing and elastic that it is used to offer a seeming explanation for nearly everything – from the loss of sleep, to rising divorce rates, to the decline of insect populations in Europe, to electricity grid failures in Texas. As a master-narrative, climatism has recognizable similarities with other appealing ideologies – such as nationalism, apocalypticism and historicism – through which ‘the true state of things’ can be revealed. All such master-narratives hold one thing in common: tenacious belief in, and defence of, ‘special knowledge’ can explain the existence of otherwise bewildering social, cultural and even political phenomena.
Having explained why climatism is alluring, Chapter 5 then answers the question ‘Why is Climatism Dangerous?’ I elaborate five dangers of this ideological stance. First, climatism is always in danger of veering towards environmental determinism, the belief that human societies are ‘prisoners of geography’, to cite Tim Marshall’s eponymous 2015 book,7 or, in this case, prisoners of climate. Yet the effects that climates have on societies and ecologies are always heavily conditioned by a complex array of social, cultural, political and historical factors. Mono-causal explanations are usually wrong and sometimes dangerous. Second, through its adoption of apparently naturalized deadlines by which certain abstract numerical targets must be achieved, climatism creates a dangerous discourse of scarcity. Under this discursive condition there is not enough time to reflect, deliberate or experiment. Everything in public life is conducted ‘in a hurry’ which often leads to poor decision-making.
This then leads to a third danger, namely that climatism depoliticizes climate change. It reduces public politics to the politics of net-zero emissions; ‘the ends justify the means’, the motto of all totalitarian projects. Which, relatedly, points to the fourth danger, the anti-democratic impulse lurking within climatism. As a totalizing ideology, climatism brooks no public dissent. It seeks to police the boundaries of what can and cannot legitimately be said about climate change, not just about climate science, but also about climate politics and policies. Finally, through its myopic outlook on the world, climatism frequently leads to perverse outcomes. Climatist policies, quite reasonably, seek to reduce the extent of the human influence on climate. But in doing so they frequently create new – and sometimes quite troubling – social, ecological and political dangers and inequities.
If climatism is a dangerous ideology, then what is the alternative? Chapter 6, ‘If Not Climatism, Then What?’, offers some antidotes to the worst excesses of climatism. These include recognizing the uncertainties embedded in all climate predictions; dismantling the fear of falling over imagined climatic ‘cliff-edges’; being more humble about the limits of knowledge and about the ability of strategic planning to manage the complex contingencies of the future; recognizing the diversity of political values and preferences within and between different polities; and setting policy goals that have a direct bearing on social-ecological welfare rather than striving to control abstract and scientistic global proxies for such welfare outcomes. Taken together, these antidotes offer a more pragmatic approach to incorporating the challenges of climate change in human affairs. They better recognize the political and geopolitical realities of international negotiations and national decision-making than does holding to the ideology of climatism.
There is a danger that the argument in this book will be mischaracterized, so in Chapter 7, ‘Some Objections’, I conclude by responding to some possible criticisms. For example, I tackle the objections that climate science is not alarmist, but in fact errs on the side of least drama; that climate change is an existential risk, and should be tackled as the number one priority; that ‘justice’ is much more central to climatists’ policies than I imply; that the ideology of capitalism needs to be confronted with a competing ideology; and that, in the end, I sound just like a climate denier.
Notes
1.
This account is based on Marwa Daoudy’s
