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Mike Hulme is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK, founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Reseach and Editor-in-Chief of the review journal WIREs Climate Change. He is the author of eight books on climate change, including Why We Disagree About mostra'n més Climate Change and Can Science Fix Climate Change? mostra'n menys

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Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination (2010) — Col·laborador — 14 exemplars

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This is an immensely readable book: no mean feat for a work such as this. Mike Hulme keeps both jargon and acronyms to a minimum. He also speaks in a common sense manner; no wild theories here.

Hulme argues that the urgency being expressed by scientists and politicians is over-blown: not, in the sense that climate change doesn't matter, but he suggests that the, "We only have 24 hours to fix the climate" brigade are creating panic for their own ends. He does a very good job of gain-saying the idea that a 'global thermostat' might be installed in the form of a sulphate aerosol shield to deflect the sun's rays. The earth, he states, cannot be uniformly controlled. The shield might reduce overall temperature but would, almost certainly, cause havoc with local weather systems.

My only criticism, is that he appears to believe that things will not be done without global agreement. If recent history has taught us anything, it must surely be that, when the USA and Europe decide that something is going to be done, the views of everyone else count as nothing.

This book gives a considerable amount of information and certainly leaves me better informed to take part in any discussion of global warming. I would highly recommend the reading of this book.
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the.ken.petersen | Sep 22, 2014 |
This book does not fit into the heavily populated and familiar genre of polemical discourses about climate change. Instead, Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA), seeks to take a step back to examine what is it about climate change that causes it to be a topic of such heated debate? Hulme starts with a discussion of the social meanings of climate and asks: “If you were going to design the ideal climate, what would it look like?” He points out that there are few climates on earth where humans have not lived and survived, and discusses the cultural concept of climate and how it has varied. He moves on to discuss how climate change is a classic example of ‘post-normal science’ where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes are high and decisions urgent.” Forming a consensus of scientific opinion about climate change is not a scientific method of establishing the truth. It is a political method, and consensus scientific opinion has been wrong in the past. Nevertheless consensus building may be the “least worst” option for providing advice to policy makers. Disagreement about what the science says about climate change is just the start in this debate. We can then disagree about how the scientific consensus is established, communicated, and turned into policy decisions.

The book then moves on to the thorny questions around the economics of climate change. What price do we put on the environment? What discount rate do we use? What is the social cost of carbon? How do we decide how much money to spend on mitigating climate change and who should pay for it? In all of this our differing moral and religious views come into play and cause different views on our duty to nature and to others. Secular environmentalism is described as a religion in its own right with its own versions of sin, guilt, repentance, apocalyptic judgement, religious dogma, evangelical preachers, means of redemption, and even carbon indulgences!

Hulme then explores our differing attitudes to risk which result in different views on what would constitute ‘dangerous’ climate change. The media has a role to play here in how the science and risks involved are communicated. He criticises what has become known as ‘climate porn’ when climate change is portrayed in apocalyptic or catastrophic terms, but recognises the desire to motivate urgent action in such portrayal.

Our differing views on development bring another area of disagreement into focus. How do we measure development? Should we use something other than GDP? What is the best way of tackling poverty? Is climate change the primary threat to development or are there other factors requiring more urgent attention? What about the role of population growth? The single most carbon intensive thing you can decide to do, especially in the developed world, is to have a child. China is now claiming that their ‘one child’ policy, in place since 1979, has ‘avoided’ about 300 million births which has ‘saved’ 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 – a much greater reduction than all the measures of the Kyoto protocol. Most of the billions of people often claimed to be disadvantaged by climate change have not yet been born. So should we prioritise their welfare over today’s poor billions?

There are several tensions here: “Is climate change primarily about excessive consumption in the North or growing population in the South, about the alleviation of poverty today or about the mitigation of climate change tomorrow; about a revolution in energy technology or about a revolution in individual lifestyles?” Viewing some or all of these as false dichotomies brings yet another viewpoint to the table!

In case you thought that was quite enough to disagree about, we haven’t yet got to politics and how we decide how to tackle climate change. Here we meet the eco-anarchists who blame capitalism for climate change, the eco-authoritarians who blame liberal democracy, the market-environmentalists who blame the mis-pricing of emissions, and the eco-political pessimists who despair of any political solution to climate change. The prospect of geo-engineering then opens up another pandora’s box of political and ethical questions for us to disagree about.

So how do we respond to all this? In his conclusion, Hulme argues that it is unhelpful to portray climate change as an issue that can be ‘solved’ in the same way that technical and political resources were able to solve the problem of ozone depletion. He argues that climate change will never be ‘solved’ and framing it as a crisis in need of an urgent solution is setting ourselves up for disillusionment. Hulme urges us to engage with what climate change can do for us rather than what we can do for climate change. He presents four narratives for understanding our responses to the idea of climate change: Lamenting Eden, Presaging Apocalypse, Constructing Babel, and Celebrating Jubilee.. He encourages us to allow climate change to motivate us in the areas of social and environmental concern and to inspire creative technological and artistic responses and new ethical thinking about the future.

I found the book deeply thought-provoking and inspiring – perhaps you will disagree! This book was listed by the Economist as one of the best books of 2009 and deservedly so. It is the best book I have read on climate change and should be read by those on all sides of the various disagreements we have on the subject.

From Blog: http://www.henderson.com/sites/henderson/sri/PostDetail.aspx?postid=234
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tim.dieppe | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | Jan 5, 2011 |
Mike Hulme is a professor of climate change at East Anglia University. Yes, the university that played an important role in the crafting of the IPCC 2007 report, and at the moment finds itself at the center of the Climategate scandal. The subject of this blog post, however, is the book written by Hulme, that came out in the autumn of 2009, called “Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity”. You might ask why I’d include a book about science on a blog about culture related issues, but this is basically a book about how we perceive science, how we understand it, and how we frame scientific findings. Indeed, this is a book that tries to explain why the climate change debate has turned into an all out war between AGW supportes and skeptics, by looking at the cultural and ideological reasons, rather than the science.

Mike Hulme is not a neutral observer, and neither does he pretend to be. He states at the very start, that he is a socialdemocrat and a christian, but I have to say, that he manages to keep a reasonable distance to his subject through most of the book, and does a good job of transcending the usual quarreling and bickering you’d expect to find in a book like this.

The book consists of 10 chapters. Each treating a single topic in a systematic way. It is an easy read and Hulme is a good writer, who tries to hold your hand all the way through and succeds at that. In the first chapter he explains what climate is. How it is not to be confused with ‘weather’, and how it is abstract notion, that has changed meaning over time. As he says ‘[climate] is best understood as an idea that bind together the physical world and our cultural imagination.’ In this way it does have a physical reality of sorts, but at the same time it is intertwined with cultural meanings, making it harder to grasp and giving it different meanings for different people. The idea of climate is deeply connected to our narratives about society, and this is something that is central in this book.

Second chapter is about how climate change was discovered. Hulme make sit clear that this is not a story about linear scientific progress, but that climate science has always been heavily influenced by cultural meaning and ideology. Climate change is seen as something fluid, changing meanings through the times, and being the subject of dispute right from the very beginning. The scientific process in indeed not something that happens in a value-free vacuum. The way we decide what to investigate and how to interpret the results relies on the context that it takes place in. This fact can sometimes be forgotten amidst all the government policies based on ’scientific evidence’.

This leads to the next chapter, where he investigates the expectations that we have when it comes to science. How do we relate the scientific findings to the idea of ‘truth’ and to the forming of policies? The answer is that this is a subjective matter, and that ’scientific evidence’ does not leave the researchers office unchanged, but undergoes a transformation as it enters into the world outside, where it can be used to legitimate action. Action based on ideologies and cultural understandings. So often we hear politicians or interest groups claiming that this or that policy must be enforced because science dictates it. That the politician is just some messenger who brings us the tides from the world of science and that the policies regarding climate change are independent of ideology, but rather the result of value-free science. This view of science, as something certain, that can give us definitive answers is not really useful when it comes to climate change, as it is an area with great uncertainty. Hulme also gives details on how the science of the IPCC reports are made and why there are so many uncertainties, which is extremely interesting.

The next two chapters are about the values that we inject into the idea of climate change. Should we do something about climate change to save future generations or should we use the money to save the people starving in the world now? Which is more important? Nature? Or humans? Hulme also delves into the economical projections that are used by the IPCC and The Stern Review and how these also represent specific narratives about the world we live in. How we value what should be done is dependent on our ideological views. What is important to us? Should climate policies be a matter of economic justice, and if so, what does justice mean? Is the story about climate change one of colonialism or market failure or ’system failure’ or is it an inevitable price of progress? It could also be seen as a punishment from God, and some religious people do frame what they deem to be irresponsible behaviour that causes climate change as ’sin’. There are so many narratives about climate change, because we have so many different ways of navigating the world we live in. It is difficult to reconcile them all, and climate change becomes a part of the ideological battles that already existed since long ago.

These different narratives also forms the way we frame and assess the risks of climate change, which is the subject of the following two chapters. Hulme makes it clear that assessing risks will always be a subjective matter. There is no objective way of doing this. When we assess the risks then we have to frame them in some way. The risk of what? Apocalypse? That God’s wrath will strike us? That people in the third world will become ‘climate refugees’? That the coast of Norway will become nice and warm with palm trees and everything? Our expectations have everything to do with our fears and these have everything to do with the narratives we tell ourself about the world.

Hulme the goes on to talk about the policies that politicians choose. How do they arrive at them? Especially the two conflicting world views between people who view the world as a zero-sum game where trade-offs have to be made and those who view the world as a place with no limits for growth seems to at odds. In the last chapter he tries to present different ways that one could look at climate change, so that it could present opportunity to action and a different world. I have to say that this chapter is maybe not the strongest, but it could be used as an offset for debate on how to view climate change and I don’t think he has meant it as anything else.

All in all, Hulme does an impressive job of analysing the disagreements and discussions of climate change, and in many ways it was an eye-opener to me. The book is very thought provoking and it will make you stop and think, next time you hear someone making claims about climate change in the media. Keeping in mind that the results of science does not arrive at our doorstep in ‘pure’ form is the first step towards a serious debate about climate change.

from my blog http://culturedaddy.me
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danielbeattie | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | Feb 10, 2010 |
What a marvelous, thought-provoking book.

It was not an easy read. I don't mean it because the prose is obscure (though it could be better), but because it demanded from me some mental strength to break out of my own perspective, again and again, to try and see the world as others see it. It required patience and a cool head.

But the rewards are significant. Hulme explains the many reasons why humanity disagrees about climate change: why we have different ideas about the role of Nature, about scientific knowledge and technology, about economics, ethics, religion, culture, and politics. Through reading it I came to see why my solutions to climate change turn off or are perceived as problems for others, what could the role of society and government be in addressing the problem, and why some people just don't seem to care. I also came to understand my own views on environmentalism and on our place in the world far better than I used to.

This is a complex book, and a strange one --it covers the hairy mess of disciplines and fields of study that converge in climate change. Among many other things it talks about science and myth, about carbon markets and eco-anarchism. It does it all lucidly and convincingly. It's unique, and it's one of the best books I've read.
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jorgearanda | Hi ha 3 ressenyes més | Dec 2, 2009 |

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