Climate Alarm Has Become a Dangerous Ideology, Says Cambridge Academic

Mike Hulme, Professor of Human Geography at Cambridge University, has come out with a dark warning that the obsession with climate change as the cause of all our ills, and the only problem worth focusing any attention on, has turned ‘climatism’ into an ideology and left the science far behind. The Mail, which interviewed him, has the story:

In his most recent book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything (2023), Hulme argued that belief in the urgent fight against climate change has shot far past the territory of science and become an ideology.

Hulme… dubs this ideology “climatism”, and he argues that it can distort the way society approaches the world’s ills, placing too much focus on slowing Earth from warming.

The problem, he said, is this narrow focus takes attention away from other important moral, ethical, and political objectives – like helping people in the developing world rise out of poverty.

As with other ‘isms’ – like cubism or romanticism – ideologies provide a way of thinking about things, explained Hulme.

“They’re like spectacles that help us to make sense of the world, according to a predefined framework or structure,” he said.

To be clear, Hulme does not claim that all ideologies are wrong.

“We all need ideologies, and we all have them – whether you’re a Marxist or a nationalist, you’re likely to hold an ideology of some form or other,” he added.

As Hulme sees it, many journalists, advocates and casual observers of climate change have become devotees of climatism, inaccurately attributing many events that happen in the world as being caused by climate change.

“No matter how complex a particular causal chain might be, it’s a very convenient shorthand to say, ‘Oh, well, this was caused by climate change’,” Hulme said.

“It’s a very shallow and simplistic way, I would argue, to try to describe events that are happening in the world.”

Hulme doesn’t argue that the effects of climate change are not happening, though, just that stopping climate change won’t stop disasters from happening altogether.

“Fundamentally, we’re going to have to deal with hurricanes, and we’re not going to deal with them just by cutting our carbon emissions,” he said.

The danger of climatism, he pointed out, is that it leads people down a false chain of events: if all of these things happening in the world are caused by climate change, then all we have to do is stop climate change, and all the other things will stop themselves. …

“The danger is if we obsess about just climate change, if we think that climate change holds the key to wellbeing and a better future, we take attention away from interventions that will make progress on the sustainable development goals,” he said.

Beyond these mixed up priorities, Hulme also takes issue with what he sees as an obsession with deadlines: “There’s this idea of the ticking clock counting down to Ground Zero – we’ve only got five years, 10 years, two years – however long different commentators put the deadline.”

He calls this line of thinking “deadline-ism”, a sort of sub-ideology of climatism, and he says he finds it unhelpful.

“It’s like holding a gun to your head and saying, ‘You’ve only got three seconds to make a decision’.”

Hulme warns that by promoting fatalism, the risk is that climatism will encourage people to give up on the grounds that it’s pointless. It also generates cynicism – because the world manifestly isn’t ending, and as one deadline after another passes without the promised catastrophe, people stop listening. Hulme emerges as a pragmatist, and while you may disagree with his view that “carbon-emitting energy sources” need to be phased out, his overall pragmatism is certainly refreshing, particularly from a Cambridge academic:

“We do need smart climate policies, whether it’s mitigation or adaptation,” he said.

“We need energy transitions away from carbon-emitting energy sources, and that energy transition is going to come through innovation. It’s going to come through smart people doing smart things more efficiently, with the human ingenuity and creativity that we’ve been granted, making use of the material resources that the planet offers.”

Worth reading in full.