Professor Mike Hulme, Restructuring climate policy for a partisan era

Thursday 5th May

Turner Hall, TAFE, Maryann Street, Ultimo

5.30pm Drinks, 6pm Lecture

I suggest that our ultimate goal is not to ‘stop climate change’. We have mistaken the means for the end. Our goal is surely to ensure that the basic human needs of the world’s growing population are adequately met; that we move towards a development paradigm where we are living within our techno-ecological means and not beyond them; and that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from a changing climate - distinguishing whether those risks and dangers are natural or not is hardly the point. It is not more certain scientific predictions that we need; nor a charismatic leader to arise from ‘the east’; nor grand dreams of creating a global thermostat in the sky above. It is what Sheila Jasanoff has referred to as the ‘technologies of humility’ – ‘disciplined methods to accommodate the partiality of scientific knowledge and to act under irredeemable uncertainty’ - that will offer us the best prospects for taming the risks of climate change.

Tags: #hotscience | climate change | Mike Hulme | hot science global citizens

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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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