This is a guest post by Simon Anthony.
Lecture on 29th April at School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford by Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia.
MH’s talk was based on his book of the same title. His aim is not to investigate climate change via models, analysis etc but to discuss other ways of seeing the world, for example, through the work of Mary Douglas, an anthropologist who originated the field of “Cultural Theory of Risk”, to try to understand the underlying source of disagreement.
The idea is that different people have different attitudes to risk, depending on their personal situations, characters, experiences, values, ideologies etc. For example, MD classified people into 4 types: fatalists, hierarchists (want to preserve existing order), individualists (want to preserve private freedoms) and egalitarians. Each type is claimed to have a particular attitude towards nature (fatalist sees nature as capricious, hierarchist as resilient/stable against small perturbations but unstable against larger, individualist as benign/stable, egalitarian as ephemeral/unstable).
When faced with a complex and potentially threatening situation with no utterly conclusive interpretation or solution, people’s perception and approach to the situation is shaped by their attitude to risk. Climate change is such a situation and, lacking certainty, people disagree because their attitudes towards nature conflict with one another.
MH went on to detail various ways of approaching CC: geographical, historical, religious, scientific etc and talked of different myths, world-views, pluralism in discourse etc. However, he didn’t add much to his starting point that CC is a current battleground in an age-old war between essentially opposing attitudes towards risk, nature and change.
MH was in a hurry to catch a train so the lecture was short. He did however have time for some questions.
Q: Is the science settled? Making such a claim shows misunderstanding of both science (which is always open and unfinished) and policy making (science doesn’t determine policy; to allow it to do so would close down debate and be anti-democratic)
Q: What about the media post-Climategate? Fred Pearce was unfairly criticised by AGW “supporters” for a sequence of post-CG articles in the Guardian. MH thought FP was trying to decide whether climate scientists hadn’t been properly held to account or whether the emails and the consequent furore were somehow due a conspiracy. MH thought the truth was somewhere in between.
Q: What about new media? Before CG, MH had never looked at a sceptical climate blog. Having now done so, he’d been astonished by the energy of the bloggers, although taken aback by the etiquette, which wasn’t what he was used to. He thought some sceptical blogs were useful and that some criticisms of climate science have a great deal of validity. Blogs challenge the peer review process. As a journal editor, he was familiar with the usual peer review methods and their shortcomings (eg reviewers chosen by a nod-and-a-wink) and accepted that some bloggers’ criticisms were valid.