Nicholas Clairmont reviews the book in this publication we have recently been following:
A new book warns against pushing all the world’s problems into the climate bucket.
Mike Hulme, a Cambridge professor of human geography who has served on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and holds a certificate for his contributions to that body’s climate science from when it was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, is no climate denier. And yet time and again in his new book he is at pains to preempt the charge that, actually, he is. “Again, don’t misread me,” he writes at one point, “climate kills and climate change is real.” Elsewhere in the book he describes human-caused climate change as a “scientifically well-established fact.” So why the anxiety that readers will say, as he anticipates, “you sound just like a climate denier”?
Hulme is worried because, in arguing that “climate change is a significant risk with uneven effects” but “not a collective existential one,” he rejects what he calls the “master-narrative of climate change,” which resides in the public imagination and some of the most powerful social and political organizations. “Climatism,” as Hulme explains, “is the settled belief that the dominant explanation of social, economic and ecological phenomena is ‘a human-caused change in the climate.’ It frames the complex political and ethical challenges confronting the world today first and foremost in terms of a changing climate.” This “ideology,” Hulme worries, has come to rule and narrow the way we think about climate change so much that the only alternative to it would seem to be climate denial.
Climate Change Isn’t Everything is a much-needed intervention to get beyond this false choice, one in which both options are not only wrong but dangerous, and to offer a better one instead.
Climatism is, for example, the belief that a drought caused by climate change was a major factor in the civil war in Syria that began in 2011 — a belief, as Hulme cites, that major media organizations as well as world leaders have touted. In 2015, John Kerry, then U.S. Secretary of State, said “it’s not a coincidence that immediately prior to the civil war in Syria, the country experienced its worst drought on record.” And, then-Prince Charles claimed that “there is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for five or six years.” It may or may not be the case that a drought contributed to the conditions leading to the Syrian bloodbath, but it is not in serious dispute whether those conditions or Bashar al-Assad’s political decisions themselves were the foremost factor.
Hulme cites several other examples of how “global geopolitical security has become climatized,” including the claim, according to one journalist, that “one of the decisive factors behind the Taliban’s sudden takeover of Afghanistan [in 2021] has been hidden in plain sight — climate change.” Similarly, Hulme shows how a religious history scholar attributes massive theological shifts in history to climatic “shocks.”
In the case of extreme weather disasters, news reports often attribute them to climate change when they would be better, or at least better mainly, understood as failures of infrastructure management. For example, devastation from the 2009 Cyclone Aila in Bangladesh, which Hulme says was widely discussed as caused primarily by climate change, “was due largely to unmaintained embankments and to the rapid influx of people into the most vulnerable coastal areas,” plus “the damming of major rivers and the pumping of shallow saline water sources for irrigation.”…
Read the whole review here.
Organikos 