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Why Do We Disagree on Climate Change?
with Mike Hulme, “(Still) Disagreeing about Climate Change: Which Way Forward?”;
Annick de Witt, “Climate Change and the Clash of Worldviews: An Exploration of How
to Move Forward in a Polarized Debate”; Lisa Stenmark, “Storytelling and Wicked
Problems: Myths of the Absolute and Climate Change”; Jonathan Moo, “Climate Change
and the Apocalyptic Imagination: Science, Faith, and Ecological Responsibility”; and
Mary Evelyn Tucker, “Can Science and Religion Respond to Climate Change?”
(STILL) DISAGREEING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE:
WHICH WAY FORWARD?
by Mike Hulme
Abstract. Why does climate change continue to be a forceful idea
which divides people? What does this tell us about science, about culture,
and about the future? Despite disagreement, how might the idea
of climate change nevertheless be used creatively? In this essay I develop
my investigation of these questions using four lines of argument.
First, the future risks associated with human-caused climate change
are severely underdetermined by science. Scientific predictions of future
climates are poorly constrained; even more so the consequences
of such climates for evolving human socio-technological and natural
ecosystems. Second, I argue that to act politically in the world, people
have to pass judgments on the facts of science; facts do not speak for
themselves. Third, because these judgments are different, the strategic
goals of policy interventions developed in response to risks associated
with future climate change are inevitably multiple and conflicting.
Finally, reconciling and achieving diverse goals requires political contestation.
“Moving forward” on climate change then becomes a task
of investing in the discursive and procedural preconditions for an agonistic
politics to work constructively, to enable ways of implementing
policies when people disagree.
Keywords: Anthropocene; climate change; democracy; pluralism;
politics; synecdoche
Climate change is an environmental, cultural, and political phenomenon
which is reshaping the way people think about themselves, their societies
and their Earthly futures. It is therefore an exemplary case of scientific
knowledge, personal experience, and the human imagination interacting
Mike Hulme is Professor of Climate and Culture, Department of Geography, King’s
College, London, UK; email: mike.hulme@kcl.ac.uk.
[Zygon, vol. 50, no. 4 (December 2015)]
www.zygonjournal.org
C 2015 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon ISSN 0591-2385 893
894 Zygon
in multiple, complex and changing social contexts. As Lucien Boia observes
in his book The Weather in the Imagination, “Global warming and global
cooling are physical phenomena. 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” (Boia 2005, 181). For example,
the idea of climate change has provoked the emerging narrative of the
Anthropocene—which posits a new geological era in which human actions
have become dominant in planetary functioning. In this narrative, the
long-standing separation in Western thought of nature from culture is no
longer tenable.
In Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy,
Inaction and Opportunity (Hulme 2009), I considered the different ways
people think about, and act in response to, climate change in the context
of science, economics, religion, fear, risk, development, and politics. I
argued that the idea of climate change mobilizes very different meanings,
ideologies, values, and goals—“it means different things to different people
in different contexts, places and networks” (325). That book was written
during the winter of 2007–8 and in the eight years since then many
things have changed in the cultural politics of climate change. But my key
argument remains valid: it is necessary to reveal the underlying reasons
for disagreement about how to act in response to climate change before
it is possible to find constructive ways of acting politically in the world.
In this essay I want to pursue this investigation further by asking, and
seeking to answer, these questions: Why does climate change continue to
be a forceful idea which divides people, and what does this tell us about
science, about culture, and about the future? What does climate change
mean to different people? Despite disagreement, how might the idea of
climate change nevertheless be used creatively to enact change?
The anthropologist Michael Dove has argued that climatic and human
agency have historically been understood not as two separate domains
with one causing or shaping the other (Dove 2015). Rather, for much of
cultural history and in most places, climate and human agency have been
understood to be co-dependent. Agency to shape the future is distributed
between climate and humans; neither climate nor humans are in charge.
The idea of human-caused climate change—and its progeny, the idea of
the Anthropocene—has (in the enlightened West) reacquainted citizens
with the unavoidable intimacy they have with the weather. If true, it
means that any account of future climate given by merely scientific inquiry
can never be complete since human actions are always imaginatively and
morally reflexive. Merely constructing scientific truth or establishing expert
consensus about the biogeophysics of the climate system is too limited a
basis for acting in the world (Rescher 1993).
I develop my investigation along four lines. First, the future risks associated
with human-caused climate change are severely underdetermined
Mike Hulme 895
by science. Although scientific inquiry has revealed humans as now powerful
actors in influencing the climate system, scientific predictions of
future climates are poorly constrained. Even less constrained are the consequences
of these climates for evolving human socio-technological and
natural ecosystems. Second, following Hannah Arendt (1958), I argue
that people have to pass judgments on facts before they can act politically
in the world. Facts do not speak for themselves, least of all the
underdetermined facts of the climatic and human future. Third, because
people judge the facts of climate change in different ways, the strategic
goals of policy interventions developed in response to the putative risks associated
with future climate change are inevitably multiple and conflicting.
They are shaped by different worldviews, different ethical systems, and different
accounts of good human living. And then, finally, how these diverse
goals are achieved—the specific policies and human actions that materialize
in specific societies—remain politically contested. These policies and
actions reflect diverse values about what is at stake and different preferences
for who is licensed to act. “Moving forward” on climate change then becomes
a task of investing in discursive and procedural pre-conditions for an
agonistic politics to work constructively, to enable ways of implementing
policies when people disagree.
THE RISKS OF CLIMATE CHANGE ARE UNDERDETERMINED
Scientific inquiry never yields the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth. Least of all can it do so with respect to the future. The
future, singular, is inaccessible to human minds because our knowledge
of the outcome of interacting physical processes is deficient. But it is also
underdetermined because of human agency: the mere act of imagining
a possible future changes the likelihood and character of the future thus
imagined. Despite the heroic efforts of many climate change researchers
and international knowledge assessments such as the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this remains inescapably the case with
regard to the climatic future. The scientific consensus on climate change
thus becomes unhelpfully limiting. The “97.1% consensus” that has been
widely circulated (e.g., Cook et al. 2013), is a consensus regarding only
the extent of the belief among relevant experts that humans are exerting a
significant influence on the climate system. The future risks for society and
ecology resulting from this influence are known by experts and analysts
much more diffusely. I have written elsewhere about the dangers of climate
reductionism (Hulme 2011), about the dangers of elevating climate as a
predictor of future social and ecological change without appreciating the
deep contingency of these changes. The most that can safely be stated is
that human actions on the atmosphere are changing existing environmental
and social risks and introducing new ones.
896 Zygon
The language of risk is one that the IPCC adopted more explicitly in
its Fifth Assessment Report, especially in its Working Group 2 volume
on impacts and adaptation options (IPCC 2015a, 2015b). Chris Field,
the co-chair of this working group, explained one of the consequences
of this linguistic move: “Characterizing climate change as a challenge in
managing risks opens doors to a wide range of options for solutions”
(quoted in Painter 2015, 286). This is because the idea of “risk”—with its
attendant uncertainties and subjectivities—opens the space for different
ethical, political, and economic judgments to be made about different
courses of action to ameliorate or tolerate these risks. The language of
risk also challenges the univocal narrative of climate change (“the plan”
as articulated by Sarewitz, 2011) as being partial at best, unhelpful at
worst. Since the risks of future climate change are underdetermined, and
how those risks are interpreted and acted upon is plural, we begin to see
why climate change means different things for different people in different
places, indeed why it must do so. Masking such differences by repeatedly
emphasizing the limited—limited in epistemic extent rather than depth—
scientific consensus is unhelpful (Hulme 2015a).
PASSING JUDGMENT ON THE FACTS
“Nature” should never be our moral or political guide, as is clear for
example in relation to sexual or development ethics. Quite apart from
philosophical objections to such a position,1
since human actions are increasingly
reshaping bodily and planetary natures, there is no “nature”
which is itself free from human agency (Albertson and King 2010). Yet
even if there were, simply knowing “the facts” of climate change would
be insufficient to inspire or determine political action in the world. The
former chairman of the IPCC, R. K. Pachauri, was profoundly wrong
when he claimed in November 2014 at the launch of the Synthesis Report
of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment that “all we need is the will to change,
which we trust will be motivated by . . . an understanding of the science
of climate change” (IPCC 2014). Simply understanding climate science is
not all that is needed to act. Similarly, when the American Association for
the Advancement of Science called for “decisive political action” on climate
change on the basis of “what we know” (Pinholster 2014), it begged the
question about how diverse and competing human political and ethical values
are to be reconciled for determining what that “decisive action” should
consist of.
What climate change requires of us cannot be read from the pages of the
IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. There is no one story to tell about climate
change; there is no single imperative to act. Hannah Arendt explained this
position half a century ago in The Human Condition (Arendt 1958). For
Mike Hulme 897
Arendt, each individual has to pass judgment on the facts before he or she
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. (Arendt 1958, 3)
Integral to such judgment is the establishment of meaning. “What do the
facts mean?” Since climate change prompts us to think about the future,
and about human responsibility for that future, cosmologies, ideologies,
beliefs, and cultural practices become relevant and motivating. These rich
and historically mediated human attributes help us to pass judgment on
the facts. Merely “understanding the science of climate change” can never
be enough. The meaning of climate change, and the moral and ethical
demands it places upon humans, will therefore inevitably be understood
differently within and across diverse human cultures. Meaning-making
precedes action. To quote Arendt again: “Men [sic] in the plural, that is,
men in so far as they live and move and act in this world can experience
meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each
other and to themselves” (1958, 4). The diversity of meanings which
emerges from the idea of climate change, and what animates such meanings,
is well explored in two recent books: Candis Callison’s How Climate Change
Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (2014) and Philip Smith and
Nicholas Howe’s Climate Change as Social Drama (2015).
Given that climate change induces multiple meanings it is perhaps
fruitful to think of the phrase “climate change” as a synecdoche; that is,
as replacive speech in which a part stands for a whole (as in “fifty sail”
for “fifty ships”) or vice versa (as in “society” for “high society”). So what
things, what ideas, might climate change “stand for”? Out of a much larger
array of possibilities let me suggest here just four.
Climate change stands for “risk society.” Taking inspiration from the
work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, this modernist reading of
climate change places it as a future risk which disciplines the present. Both
authors approach climate change firmly from the perspective of modernity
and the idea that today’s societies, unlike preceding ones, live in the future
rather than in the past. For Giddens, a risk society is one which becomes
preoccupied with future risk and concerned with how such speculative risks
can be tamed and safely navigated in the present. Ulrich Beck explains:
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 nonexistent,
fictitious and constructed, as the basis for present-day action. . . .
Expected risks are the whip to keep the present in line. The more threatening
898 Zygon
the shadows that fall on the present because a terrible future is impending,
the more believed are the headlines provoked by the dramatization of risk
today. (Beck 1997, 20)
Climate change with its future drama and “threatening shadows” works
precisely to exert such a hold on the present. Climate risks become mediatized
(Weingart, Engels, and Pansegrau 2000); climate change becomes
an imagined spectacle which appears to “demand” new techno-economic
instruments of risk management.
Climate change stands for “capitalism.” A different reading of climate
change is to understand it as a decisive weapon to use in an ideological
struggle. Climate change thus becomes a synecdoche for the evils of global
capitalism. Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Climate versus
Capitalism (Klein 2014) is a good illustration of this position. Klein makes
explicit this instrumental role that climate change plays for her: “ . . . I
realized the science of global warming . . . could be a catalyst for forms
of social and economic justice in which I already believed” (59). Climate
change works in this way too for those seeing the world through an explicitly
socialist ideology. Here is Suzanna Jeffrey writing in International Socialism
(Jeffrey 2011),
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 prioritizes profit over the world’s climate.
Climate change stands for “lost nature.” A third meaning of climate
change is that is stands for a lost nature. Bill McKibbin’s best-selling
book The End of Nature (McKibbin 1989) was an early and prominent
articulation of this narrative with respect to climate change, and it is a
narrative which has deep resonance across many cultures (Rudiak-Gould
2012; Haluza-Delay 2014). The Edenic myth is a lament for a lost order
and stability in a natural (and maybe God-given) world. Climate change
eats away at the material foundations of a utopian future, a sentiment
captured by Boia: “The history of humanity is characterized by an endemic
anxiety . . . it is as if something or someone is remorselessly trying to
sabotage the world’s driving force—and particularly its climate” (Boia
2005, 149). It is the same anxiety echoed in this lament from the United
Kingdom’s Camp for Climate Action (2008):
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 cuckoos are
Mike Hulme 899
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.
Climate change therefore unsettles what had been presumed to be settled,
whether that be a particular set of climatic conditions (Hulme 2015b) or
an assumed purity or separateness of the natural world beyond the reach of
humans. This way of making sense of climate change, of giving it meaning,
resonates with the idea of “things falling apart” which Nigerian novelist
Chinua Achebe explored—in a different context —in his eponymous bestselling
post-colonial novel set in West Africa (Achebe 1958). And it is
reflected too in the Dark Mountain Project, a UK-based cultural movement
triggered by the negotiating failures of COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009.
In the words of joint founder Paul Kingsnorth (undated):
Dark Mountain became a wider cultural movement of people who had
stopped believing in the conventional narratives about the future, and who
wanted to start unweaving some of the myths of human centrality; of our
separation from something called ‘Nature’; of endless progress; of our ability
to control the Earth.
Climate change stands for “the Anthropocene.” A fourth synecdoche for
climate change is to see it standing in for the larger (and more ambiguous)
idea of the Anthropocene. This proposed new epoch is one in which
the collective force of human activities remakes the physical world and
leaves ineradicable traces in geological strata; in the words of one recent
review, “Human activity is now global and is the dominant cause of most
contemporary environmental change” (Lewis and Maslin 2015, 171). With
climate change as a synecdoche for the Anthropocene it becomes an idea
which reveals the changed relationship between humans and nature, an
idea which “invites techno-managerial planning and expert administration
at the expense of democratic debate and contestation” (L¨ovbrand et al.
2015, 217). Yet there are many different Anthropocenes to be imagined.
For some, climate change offers the hope of a “brave new world” and the
prospects of a “Great Anthropocene” (Breakthrough Institute 2015) and
for others the possibilities of a “Charming Anthropocene” (Buck 2015). For
others still, climate change signals the first moves into dangerous “operating
space” for humanity (Rockstr¨om et al. 2009).
MULTIPLE AND CONFLICTING GOALS
With the facts of climate change judged in these and other ways, it becomes
clearer to see the range of preferred courses of action to be pursued. Out
of these different meanings, these different narratives of what climate
change stands for, emerge multiple and often conflicting goals. The goals
of “action” on climate change might therefore be, inter alia, to limit global
900 Zygon
warming to two degrees, to deliver creation care, to design a planetary
thermostat, to transform civilization or to safeguard economic growth—or
indeed to secure fair growth, zero growth or de-growth. All of these goals
have prima facie credibility since they emerge from different readings of
what climate change is about, inspired by different cosmologies and ethical
or political values. They emerge from different judgments being passed on
the facts. Far from their being the possibility of a singular “decisive political
action” on climate change, the strategic goals of policy interventions are
inevitably multivariate because they are shaped by different worldviews
and different narratives of good human living.
It is for this reason that Luers and Sklar (2014, 114) declare that “the
focus on a single target [two degrees of warming] has become an obstacle
[to effective policy-making] because it . . . frames climate change as a
distant abstract threat and fails to recognize the diversity of values and risk
perceptions of people around the world.” This, too, is the position taken
by Victor and Kennel (2014) in their argument for moving away from a
singular climate policy target in favor of a basket of goals, a strategy of
multiple goal-seeking. Climate risks have to be contextualized alongside
other risk and welfare issues, for example as articulated in the multiple
objectives of the newly negotiated Sustainable Development Goals. This
move away from climate exceptionalism was evident in the framing of some
of the chapters in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Working Group 2 Report
(IPCC 2015a, b).
USING POLITICS TO MOVE FORWARD
So, in the light of such diversity and plurality what way forward? One way
is the programme of global environmental visioning—under the rubric
“the future we want”—that has been developed for the United Nations.
This initiative, emerging from the Rio+20 Summit in 2012, aims to gather
“priorities of people from every corner of the world, [to] . . . 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!” (Beyond 2015 2014). But can a “collective
vision” based on the “aspirations of all citizens” really be constructed? In
their analysis of a similar global visioning process conducted by the Danish
government in 2009 in the run-up to COP15 in Copenhagen, Blue and
Medlock (2014) identify the dangers of such ambition. Their careful analysis
of the framings and citizen engagements used in this process concluded
that it is essential to maintain diversity of meanings and plurality of visions
in such dialogues: “ . . . the more universal and standardized scientific
discourse becomes for global policy purposes, the more responsive formal
participatory initiatives should be to diverse public meanings” (576). A
singular “future” imagined by a collective “we” is an unachievable goal.
Mike Hulme 901
Neither, I suggest, is the way forward simply an endorsement of the
types of elitist proclamation about “what must be done,” such as the one
released by the Earth League on Earth Day in April 2015 (Earth League
2015). This self-selecting group of 18 leading academics and environmental
scientists offered the world’s governments, meeting in Paris at COP21 later
in 2015, “eight essential elements of climate action.” They were clear in
the definitive necessity of what had to be done, using phrases such as
“The carbon budget must . . . ,” “We need to . . . ,” “Every country must
. . . ,” “We must unleash . . . ,” “We must safeguard sinks . . . ,” “We must
realize . . . ” It may be the case that these particular 18 scientists “speak
with one voice” (quoted in Rockstr¨om et al. 2015, 607, another article
taking inspiration from the Earth League), but as I have shown above the
world does not.
Both of these examples of “ways forward” end up suppressing the diversity
and proliferation of meanings and goals that gain inspiration from the
idea of climate change. They end up short-circuiting political processes of
opening up contest and negotiation in the name of (scientific) necessity.
Instead, I suggest a different way forward: to invest intellectual, political,
and social capital in establishing the following four pre-conditions for recognizing
and handling such plurality in relation to climate change. This
manifesto is, of course, as with the Earth League, an expression of my
own normative position. It does not emerge from “an understanding of
the science of climate change” nor from some bottom-up process of collective
global visioning. And it doesn’t jump into declaring what the world’s
governments “must” do. Instead, it draws attention to the importance of
appropriate modes of procedure.
First, science needs to be put in its place. As I have argued, scientific
knowledge about climate change will never be decisive in providing the
will to change nor in adjudicating what should be done in response to
the risks: “Science must be part of the democratic process and not a
substitute for it” (Krauss 2014, 74). For climate change this implies a shift
in perspective. Scientific knowledge, least of all consual knowledge, is not
in the foreground. Pope Francis’ recent (2015) Encyclical, On Care for Our
Common Home, is a good example of being respectful to science, but not
being obedient to it.
Second, the proliferation of diverse and inspiring narratives and meanings
surrounding the idea of climate change needs encouragement. Such
narratives gain inspiration and give expression to more deeply held human
beliefs and values which offer the promise of the “full moral voice” the
lack of which was lamented by Naomi Klein (Klein 2014). This would
include re-animating religious myths and stories which can expand cultural
repertoires—finding new stories through which to “pass judgment”
on the facts of climate change. As Forrest Clingerman (2015) argues, given
the salience of religion and religious institutions across the world, religious
902 Zygon
voices need to be heard in this public conversation (cf. Mendieta and
Vanantwerpen 2011). Again, the 2015 Papal Encyclical is a good example
(Pope Francis 2015).
Third, investment should be made in strengthening forms of political
representation which are able to function under conditions of deep
conflict— at state level, but also above and below the state. Living with climate
change is nothing less than living in an agonistic democracy, in which
those whose preferred policy options are rejected by political power nevertheless
acquiesce in decisions because their voice has been heard (Rescher
1993). It is crucial to cultivate adequate spaces of public encounter and
listening beyond the echo chambers and information cocoons of the internet
and digital social media (Sunstein 2009). The conditions that make
political judgment possible—trust in institutions, accountable power, respect
for contrary opinions, legitimate forms of representation—cultivate
an agonistic politics and an acquiescent polity (Mouffe 2005).
Fourth, I suggest that investment is needed in the cultivation of virtuous
citizens, citizens who act resolutely in the world from a sense of appropriate
purpose. This is an argument I have made elsewhere with respect to climate
change (Hulme 2014) and one that is echoed in other recent work. Di
Paola (2015), for example, draws attention to the virtues of mindfulness
and cheerfulness in the Anthropocene, for him given expression through
the cultivation of “urban gardens,” while Stirling (2015) calls for mutual
relations of “care” over the domineering rhetoric of “control.”
The goals of climate policy interventions matter, yes. And these need
clear articulation, drawing upon the range of cultural beliefs and political
values that are held between and within our societies. In a healthy
democracy it is necessary to expose this diversity of goals; and reconciling
conflicting goals is what politics is for. But the most precious investment
is to lay down the right conditions for how people wish to live and decide
together, agonistically, in democratic societies. This is to establish a secure
and rightful basis for how politics is to work, for how the powerful are to
be held accountable and the powerless to be heard. Ends matter, but so
too do means. We can neither predict nor control what the outcome of
these political conditions and human virtues will be. But then neither can
global climate be controlled nor climate change solved. It is not that sort
of phenomenon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article was developed from an invited presentation at the 2014 American
Academy of Religion Annual Conference in San Diego, California, in
November 2014. I thank Professor Willem B. Drees for this invitation and
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science for contributing to my financial costs
of attending this conference. I also thank the other members of the panel,
Mike Hulme 903
and the session audience, for their questions, thoughts, and provocations.
The ideas in this article were also presented in the annual STEPS Lecture
at the University of Sussex in May 2015.
NOTE
1. See Kwame Appiah’s review (Appiah 2010) of Sam Harris’s 2010 book The Moral
Landscape: How Science Determines Human Values.
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