Zeno Swijtink
07-16-2010, 08:53 PM
M. Hulme, Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity, Cambridge
University Press, London (2009)., 432pp
Review published in Futures 42 (2010) 648–651
[Hulme] was founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, published over a 100 peer-reviewed journal papers and over 30 books or book chapters on climate change topics, prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government, the European Commission, UNEP, UNDP, WWF International and the IPCC, and is a frequent speaker on climate change at academic, professional and public events, and writes frequently for the media
This book was suggested as a ‘‘must-read’’ for Copenhagen [1]. It is also a ‘‘must-read’’ candidate in explaining the results of the recent climate change controversy and move beyond. Drawing upon 25 years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme1, a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, provides a unique insider’s account of the emergence of climate change and the mutating and diverse ways in which it is understood. Hulme takes the reader to a fascinating discovery of the diversity and richness of the issue of climate change.
Why We Disagree About Climate Change consists of 10 chapters, with the first two chapters setting the scene for the rest of the book. Chapter 1 – The Social Meanings of Climate – offers a brief reading of the history of climate and explores the different ways in which societies, over time, have constructed the idea of climate and how they have related to its physical attributes. Chapter 2 – The Discovery of Climate Change – explains the journey of the idea that humans are an active agent in changing the physical properties of climate. The following seven chapters then examine the idea of climate change from seven different standpoints, such as science, economics, faith, psychology, communication, sociology, politics, and development. By using different lenses and concepts, Hulme demonstrates how the ways of seeing climate change can differ completely depending on one’s vantage point and political and cultural context.2 Chapter 3 – The Performance of Science – demonstrates that science and scientific knowledge can be understood in different ways. Chapter 4 – The Endowment of Value – turns the attention to economics and argues that we value things in different ways based on our values, and experiences. Chapter 5 – The Things We Believe – explores the different ways in which the major world religions have engaged with climate change, and also how other large-scale collective movements have recognized spiritual or non-material dimensions of the phenomenon. Chapter 6 – The Things We Fear – examines the construction of risk around climate change, drawing upon insights from social and behavioural psychology, risk perception and cultural theory. Chapter 7 – The Communication of Risk – considers the ways in which knowledge is differently communicated and shaped by the media. Chapter 8 – The Challenges of Development – explains why an understanding of climate change cannot be separated from an understanding of development and outlines different views and approaches. Chapter 9 – The Way We Govern – explores the various ways in which governments have approached the design and implementation of climate policy at local, national and international scales, and at the rise of non- state actors in climate governance. Through these different focuses and vantage points, Hulme helps us to understand just why we disagree about climate change. It becomes possible to see that depending on who one is and where one stands the idea of climate change carries quite variant meanings and seems to imply quite conflicting courses of action. The final chapter of the book, Chapter 10 – Beyond Climate Change – offers a perspective on climate change which transcends the categories and disagreements explored in earlier chapters.
1. Take-home message: climate change is not ‘‘an elegant problem’’ waiting for ‘‘a solution’’
By inviting us to take the journey through the different worlds of climate change, Hulme challenges what is taken for granted by mainstream scientific and political communities. First of all, he scrutinizes the well-established belief that the way we have framed these goals – most significantly through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol – is the only way of doing so, and secondly that it is necessarily the most appropriate way. His main argument is that climate change is not ‘‘a discrete problem’’ waiting for ‘‘a solution’’ that it ‘‘solved’’ fix problem.
Hulme also offers an alternative way of approaching climate change. Throughout the book, he prompts us to move beyond thinking about climate change as a solely physical phenomenon that can be observed, quantified and measured, and to begin conceiving it as a cultural and political phenomenon through which we express our values, perspectives, beliefs and ideas. In this way, he offers a re-examination of the idea of climate change from a vantage point that takes its cultural co-ordinates as seriously as its physical properties. Through this altering of perspective, climate change is shifted from an ‘‘external’’ danger to an ‘‘internal’’ societal risk. Far from simply being a change in physical climates – a change in the sequences of weather experienced in given places – climate change ceases to be simply an ‘‘issue’’ or a external ‘‘threat’’ to human societies and becomes something which is also influenced by human choices. As ‘‘humans’’ have become an active agent in the re-shaping of physical climates around the world, so to do our cultural, social, political and ethical practices re-interpret what climate change means. Additionally, Hulme also does a great job in translating between different vantage points, and opening up of the discussion on climate change.
Hulme has lent his scientific authority to offer sociological and anthropological insights into climate debates and tries to deal with hem in a symmetrical way with the so-called ‘‘sciences’’ of climate change [2]. He goes even further by openly addressing to climate science specialists and ‘‘insiders’’ the limits of climate science, the extent of the uncertainty with respect to the inevitable gaps and ambiguities in the available knowledge, all in a spirit of professional humility [3]. He thus opens up the social and political dialogue on how to respond in the light of epistemological uncertainty and competing social values, and thus links it to the much-needed discussion of the pressing issues of our time, such as matters of priorities for economic development and the way we govern ourselves. Although Hulme calls for a complete shift in the way we discuss climate change, he cannot be dismissed as a sceptic, given his undoubted standing as a distinguished climate researcher.
Following particular social science approaches [2], Hulme points out that discordant conversations about climate change reveal, at a deeper level, all that accounts for diversity, creativity and conflict within the human story—our different attitudes towards risk, technology and well-being; our various ethical, ideological and political beliefs; our different interpretations of the past and our competing visions of the future. If we are to understand climate change and use climate change constructively in our politics, we must first hear and understand these discordant voices, these multifarious human beliefs, values, attitudes, aspirations and behaviours.
Hulme is not merely advocating intellectualism. He moves beyond a simple relativist position by showing that climate change can act as a catalyst to drive a radical rethink on how we engage with this imperative issue, to revise our perception of our place in the world and to reshape the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity’s place on Earth. In doing so, he successfully argues that these explorations can inspire a collective change in imagination and communication. Hulme concludes that rather than placing ourselves in a ‘‘fight against climate change’’ we need a more constructive engagement with the idea of climate change. Climate change has more potency now as a mobilizing idea than it does as a physical phenomenon. Hulme points out that we should ‘‘use climate change both as a magnifying glass and as a mirror’’ (362). As a magnifier, climate change can help us to focus our attention on the long-term implications of short-term choices in the context of material realities and social values; and as a mirror to attend more closely to what we really want to achieve for humanity. He shows why it may be both wrong and frustrating to keep asking what we can do for climate change. Exploring the many meanings of climate in culture, and paraphrasing John F. Kennedy, Hulme asks instead what climate change can do for us. As Hulme clearly demonstrates in this book, reducing this rich and complex public discourse about the nature of ‘‘the good’’ simply to a technical or even political debate about the ‘‘acceptable’’ level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere simply misses the point. We need to see, Hulme argues, how we can use the idea of climate change to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come. Uncertainty and ambiguity emerge here not as threats but as resources, because they force us to confront those things we have taken for granted and to ask ourselves what we really want. That brings Hulme back to the fundamental question: ‘‘What is the human project ultimately about?’’ And herein resides this book’s distinctive importance.
Hulme makes great efforts to demonstrate ‘‘why we disagree’’ and to turn our understanding of disagreement from a ‘‘bothersome obstacle’’ to a productive and reflexive process. This approach also opens up a lot of questions about the implications of this approach for political decision-making and global governance. The argument that Hulme follows is that even when scientists, politicians and publics agree on the basic principles and most robust findings of climate science, there is still plenty of room for disagreement about what the implications of that science are for action. Protracted controversies presented as disputes about scientific evidence often function as proxy debates about the politics of climate change and result from the normative differences that produced divergent interpretations of scientific evidence. These may be caused by differences in epistemology, values, or the role of science in policy-making, and they may have major implications in terms of allocation of resources and responsibilities, rights and duties, and last but not least, life styles and deeply entrenched values [2]. Taking this argument seriously, what are the implications of these disagreements then for political decision-making and global governance without the ‘‘shadow of hierarchy’’? Why We Disagree about Climate Change is an important contribution to the ongoing debate over climate change. Overall, Hulme articulates quite complex and diverse arguments in a remarkably clear and coherent manner. His book makes important contributions to continued understanding of environmental, cultural, political and physical – eminently interdisciplinary – aspects of climate change. For those who are familiar with the social sciences literature on climate change, Book reviews / Futures 42 (2010) 648–651 649 the content itself may not surprise. One of the major achievements of this book is that Hulme makes these arguments accessible, meaningful and credible for a wider audience. Whether or not one will agree with his conclusions—this book is a challenging, deeply reflexive and thought-provoking way to kick-start the post-Copenhagen discussion in a more creative and less pejorative way.
References
[1] A. Revkin, Must-reads for Copenhagen, Nature Reports Climate Change 3 (2009) 121, doi:10.1038/climate.2009.102.
[2] S. Rayner, E. Malone (Eds.), Human Choice and Climate Change. Vol. 1: The Societal Framework, Batelle Press, Columbus, OH, 1999.
[3] S. Jasanoff, Speaking honestly to power, American Scientist 6 (3) (2008) 240.
Silke Beck
Department of Economics, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ,
Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
E-mail address: [email protected]
Available online 26 May 2010
Book reviews / Futures 42 (2010) 648–651
650
University Press, London (2009)., 432pp
Review published in Futures 42 (2010) 648–651
[Hulme] was founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, published over a 100 peer-reviewed journal papers and over 30 books or book chapters on climate change topics, prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government, the European Commission, UNEP, UNDP, WWF International and the IPCC, and is a frequent speaker on climate change at academic, professional and public events, and writes frequently for the media
This book was suggested as a ‘‘must-read’’ for Copenhagen [1]. It is also a ‘‘must-read’’ candidate in explaining the results of the recent climate change controversy and move beyond. Drawing upon 25 years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme1, a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, provides a unique insider’s account of the emergence of climate change and the mutating and diverse ways in which it is understood. Hulme takes the reader to a fascinating discovery of the diversity and richness of the issue of climate change.
Why We Disagree About Climate Change consists of 10 chapters, with the first two chapters setting the scene for the rest of the book. Chapter 1 – The Social Meanings of Climate – offers a brief reading of the history of climate and explores the different ways in which societies, over time, have constructed the idea of climate and how they have related to its physical attributes. Chapter 2 – The Discovery of Climate Change – explains the journey of the idea that humans are an active agent in changing the physical properties of climate. The following seven chapters then examine the idea of climate change from seven different standpoints, such as science, economics, faith, psychology, communication, sociology, politics, and development. By using different lenses and concepts, Hulme demonstrates how the ways of seeing climate change can differ completely depending on one’s vantage point and political and cultural context.2 Chapter 3 – The Performance of Science – demonstrates that science and scientific knowledge can be understood in different ways. Chapter 4 – The Endowment of Value – turns the attention to economics and argues that we value things in different ways based on our values, and experiences. Chapter 5 – The Things We Believe – explores the different ways in which the major world religions have engaged with climate change, and also how other large-scale collective movements have recognized spiritual or non-material dimensions of the phenomenon. Chapter 6 – The Things We Fear – examines the construction of risk around climate change, drawing upon insights from social and behavioural psychology, risk perception and cultural theory. Chapter 7 – The Communication of Risk – considers the ways in which knowledge is differently communicated and shaped by the media. Chapter 8 – The Challenges of Development – explains why an understanding of climate change cannot be separated from an understanding of development and outlines different views and approaches. Chapter 9 – The Way We Govern – explores the various ways in which governments have approached the design and implementation of climate policy at local, national and international scales, and at the rise of non- state actors in climate governance. Through these different focuses and vantage points, Hulme helps us to understand just why we disagree about climate change. It becomes possible to see that depending on who one is and where one stands the idea of climate change carries quite variant meanings and seems to imply quite conflicting courses of action. The final chapter of the book, Chapter 10 – Beyond Climate Change – offers a perspective on climate change which transcends the categories and disagreements explored in earlier chapters.
1. Take-home message: climate change is not ‘‘an elegant problem’’ waiting for ‘‘a solution’’
By inviting us to take the journey through the different worlds of climate change, Hulme challenges what is taken for granted by mainstream scientific and political communities. First of all, he scrutinizes the well-established belief that the way we have framed these goals – most significantly through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol – is the only way of doing so, and secondly that it is necessarily the most appropriate way. His main argument is that climate change is not ‘‘a discrete problem’’ waiting for ‘‘a solution’’ that it ‘‘solved’’ fix problem.
Hulme also offers an alternative way of approaching climate change. Throughout the book, he prompts us to move beyond thinking about climate change as a solely physical phenomenon that can be observed, quantified and measured, and to begin conceiving it as a cultural and political phenomenon through which we express our values, perspectives, beliefs and ideas. In this way, he offers a re-examination of the idea of climate change from a vantage point that takes its cultural co-ordinates as seriously as its physical properties. Through this altering of perspective, climate change is shifted from an ‘‘external’’ danger to an ‘‘internal’’ societal risk. Far from simply being a change in physical climates – a change in the sequences of weather experienced in given places – climate change ceases to be simply an ‘‘issue’’ or a external ‘‘threat’’ to human societies and becomes something which is also influenced by human choices. As ‘‘humans’’ have become an active agent in the re-shaping of physical climates around the world, so to do our cultural, social, political and ethical practices re-interpret what climate change means. Additionally, Hulme also does a great job in translating between different vantage points, and opening up of the discussion on climate change.
Hulme has lent his scientific authority to offer sociological and anthropological insights into climate debates and tries to deal with hem in a symmetrical way with the so-called ‘‘sciences’’ of climate change [2]. He goes even further by openly addressing to climate science specialists and ‘‘insiders’’ the limits of climate science, the extent of the uncertainty with respect to the inevitable gaps and ambiguities in the available knowledge, all in a spirit of professional humility [3]. He thus opens up the social and political dialogue on how to respond in the light of epistemological uncertainty and competing social values, and thus links it to the much-needed discussion of the pressing issues of our time, such as matters of priorities for economic development and the way we govern ourselves. Although Hulme calls for a complete shift in the way we discuss climate change, he cannot be dismissed as a sceptic, given his undoubted standing as a distinguished climate researcher.
Following particular social science approaches [2], Hulme points out that discordant conversations about climate change reveal, at a deeper level, all that accounts for diversity, creativity and conflict within the human story—our different attitudes towards risk, technology and well-being; our various ethical, ideological and political beliefs; our different interpretations of the past and our competing visions of the future. If we are to understand climate change and use climate change constructively in our politics, we must first hear and understand these discordant voices, these multifarious human beliefs, values, attitudes, aspirations and behaviours.
Hulme is not merely advocating intellectualism. He moves beyond a simple relativist position by showing that climate change can act as a catalyst to drive a radical rethink on how we engage with this imperative issue, to revise our perception of our place in the world and to reshape the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity’s place on Earth. In doing so, he successfully argues that these explorations can inspire a collective change in imagination and communication. Hulme concludes that rather than placing ourselves in a ‘‘fight against climate change’’ we need a more constructive engagement with the idea of climate change. Climate change has more potency now as a mobilizing idea than it does as a physical phenomenon. Hulme points out that we should ‘‘use climate change both as a magnifying glass and as a mirror’’ (362). As a magnifier, climate change can help us to focus our attention on the long-term implications of short-term choices in the context of material realities and social values; and as a mirror to attend more closely to what we really want to achieve for humanity. He shows why it may be both wrong and frustrating to keep asking what we can do for climate change. Exploring the many meanings of climate in culture, and paraphrasing John F. Kennedy, Hulme asks instead what climate change can do for us. As Hulme clearly demonstrates in this book, reducing this rich and complex public discourse about the nature of ‘‘the good’’ simply to a technical or even political debate about the ‘‘acceptable’’ level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere simply misses the point. We need to see, Hulme argues, how we can use the idea of climate change to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come. Uncertainty and ambiguity emerge here not as threats but as resources, because they force us to confront those things we have taken for granted and to ask ourselves what we really want. That brings Hulme back to the fundamental question: ‘‘What is the human project ultimately about?’’ And herein resides this book’s distinctive importance.
Hulme makes great efforts to demonstrate ‘‘why we disagree’’ and to turn our understanding of disagreement from a ‘‘bothersome obstacle’’ to a productive and reflexive process. This approach also opens up a lot of questions about the implications of this approach for political decision-making and global governance. The argument that Hulme follows is that even when scientists, politicians and publics agree on the basic principles and most robust findings of climate science, there is still plenty of room for disagreement about what the implications of that science are for action. Protracted controversies presented as disputes about scientific evidence often function as proxy debates about the politics of climate change and result from the normative differences that produced divergent interpretations of scientific evidence. These may be caused by differences in epistemology, values, or the role of science in policy-making, and they may have major implications in terms of allocation of resources and responsibilities, rights and duties, and last but not least, life styles and deeply entrenched values [2]. Taking this argument seriously, what are the implications of these disagreements then for political decision-making and global governance without the ‘‘shadow of hierarchy’’? Why We Disagree about Climate Change is an important contribution to the ongoing debate over climate change. Overall, Hulme articulates quite complex and diverse arguments in a remarkably clear and coherent manner. His book makes important contributions to continued understanding of environmental, cultural, political and physical – eminently interdisciplinary – aspects of climate change. For those who are familiar with the social sciences literature on climate change, Book reviews / Futures 42 (2010) 648–651 649 the content itself may not surprise. One of the major achievements of this book is that Hulme makes these arguments accessible, meaningful and credible for a wider audience. Whether or not one will agree with his conclusions—this book is a challenging, deeply reflexive and thought-provoking way to kick-start the post-Copenhagen discussion in a more creative and less pejorative way.
References
[1] A. Revkin, Must-reads for Copenhagen, Nature Reports Climate Change 3 (2009) 121, doi:10.1038/climate.2009.102.
[2] S. Rayner, E. Malone (Eds.), Human Choice and Climate Change. Vol. 1: The Societal Framework, Batelle Press, Columbus, OH, 1999.
[3] S. Jasanoff, Speaking honestly to power, American Scientist 6 (3) (2008) 240.
Silke Beck
Department of Economics, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ,
Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
E-mail address: [email protected]
Available online 26 May 2010
Book reviews / Futures 42 (2010) 648–651
650