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lyndakelly |
Why we disagree about climate change |
2011.05.03 21:21:25 | |
Our Symposium Keynote speaker, Professor Mike Hulme, University of East Anglia Climate change is not “a problem” waiting for “a solution”. Complex, or “wicked”, issues such as climate change do not get solved by doing better science or by finding technological fixes. Rather, climate change becomes an idea and as it travels through our various social worlds it engages with the full parade of human endeavours, conflicts and imaginative creations. Based on some of the ideas contained in my recent book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, this lecture dissects this idea of climate change – where it came from, how we study it, what it means to different people in different places and why we disagree about it. We disagree about the significance of the risks it poses. We disagree about who is responsible for causing these risks. And we disagree about what should be done about climate change – and by whom.
There is no single voice that speaks for climate. The lecture also develops a different way of approaching the idea of climate change and of working with it. Rather than seeing “stopping climate change” as the universal project around which the world must be mobilised at all costs, the idea of climate change gives us new resources – new insights, new vocabularies, new myths – which can be used creatively in our bewildering diversity of human projects. We must use the idea of climate change to open up new spaces for dissent, innovation and change, rather than seek to align the world in search of one unattainable utopia. Tags: #hotscience | climate change | Mike Hulme | hot science global citizens
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