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.
Hellbound and Down 