Mike Hulme in 2023. Source: Volkskrant.
Excerpts:
Starting in the early 1980s, I have spent my entire professional life studying climate change, as well as teaching, writing and speaking about it in universities, conferences, and public forums around the world—in 43 countries at the latest count. With such a professional and personal investment in the idea of climate change, it is not surprising that for a long period I uncritically absorbed the notion that climate change represented the pre-eminent challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century.
Since first immersing myself in the topic in the 1980s, and subsequently being part of the scientific and public story of climate change in the 1990s and 2000s[4], I was easily convinced that the growing human influence on the world’s climate would be a reality that all nations would increasingly need to confront, a reality to which their interests would necessarily be subservient and that would be decisive for shaping their development pathways. For more than half of these 40 or so years, it seemed to me self-evident that relations between nations would forcibly be re-shaped by the exigencies of a changing climate.
But now, in the mid-2020s, I can see that I got this the wrong way round. And I can also see why this was so. Rather than geopolitics having to bend to the realities of a changing climate, the opposite has happened. The unyielding force of political realism—the pursuit of the changing and unpredictable interests of nations and great powers—means that the framing, significance, and responses to climate change need continually to adapt to shifting geopolitical realities. Except that too often they haven’t. Whilst the world’s climate has undoubtedly changed over these 40 years, the geopolitics, demography, and culture of the world has changed even more.[5] Too often the language, rhetoric, and campaigning around climate change remains wedded to a world that no longer exists.
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So how did the framing and campaigning around climate change respond in the early-mid-2010s to these compounding geopolitical trends? By doubling down on what had worked before. In other words, it responded by offering new science, more science, more scary science. Science was used to reframe what climate change seemed to demand of the world. Carbon budgets replaced emissions scenarios and the idea of ‘net-zero’ emissions was born[12]; theoretical world decarbonisation pathways to achieve net-zero were modelled to keep alive the illusion that a rapid global energy transition was possible[13]; weather attribution science was created as a new tool to drive home the imminence of climate change to a sceptical public; and the language of ‘loss and damage’ emerged to appease the concerns of the developing world. And, finally, in 2015, under the rhetorical weight of this new science, the old policy target of limiting warming to 2°C was reinvented in Paris as “1.5°C”, without a flicker of realization of the impossibility of what was implied by such a number.
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It was believed—hoped?—that the world could, and the world would, bend to this demand. If climate change was ‘the greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century’ then it needed to live up to this billing. Deadlines were set—“we have 12 years to limit climate catastrophe”[14]; language was re-set—from climate change to climate crisis[15], from global warming to global weirding; doomist narratives foregrounded[16], emergencies declared, extinction envisaged, and street protests unleashed. Each new realization of just how far away the world was from placing “stopping climate change” at the centre of today’s politics provoked a reaction: science was enrolled—through the IPCC’s 1.5°C Report in 2018; the rhetoric of tipping points was ramped-up; the young (through Greta Thunberg) and then the old (through female Swiss pensioners[17]) were used as cat’s paws to deliver chimerical feel-good victories; environmental lawyers co-opted Indigenous peoples to use the west’s legal system to try to deliver what the world’s nations stubbornly refused to deliver.
And all along, Putin laughed, China’s soft power—and not-so-soft power—grew, India dissented, the Emerging and Middle Income Countries arrived, African nations kept adding people to the planet. And the worldwide demand for energy continued to rise.
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In Europe, too, the climate project began to sour. Between 2016 and 2020 the UK ‘brexited’ the EU collective, Russian gas flooded the continent before the Ukraine war in 2022 revealed the EU’s vulnerability to imperialist aggression, everywhere nativism seemed to flex new political muscles, and climate scepticism found new expressions: among farmers, motorists, and France’s gilet jaunes.
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There was a brief flicker of hope in 2020/21 when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. …
A fringe group of scientists—Scientists’ Rebellion—joined ever more extreme public protests, Just Stop Oil adopted ever more bizarre tactics, the UN Secretary-General offered ever more heated rhetoric about the world a-boiling[20], and the liberal media headed by The Guardian and New York Times amplified climate alarmism, eco-anxiety, chest-beating, and flight, meat and birth shaming.
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Neither is climate change the result of capitalism.
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So this has been my 40-year journey with climate change, initially from idealist to pragmatist, and now from pragmatist to realist. It is not a particularly hopeful story-arc, but then why should I, or anyone else, ever think that climate change was going to offer one? There is no hidden hand—least of all the benign hand of science—guiding the world to a safe climate-landing. There is no happy ending; we stumble from one thing to the next.
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Now, 30 years later, it is the geopolitical truth that power and interests win out. Climate is not the only thing that is changing through our lifetimes, and perhaps not the most important thing. …
I now see the need for a deeper reading of political realism and power, that goes beyond seeing science as a coercive force that trumps geopolitics, beyond appeals to a superficial cosmopolitanism. To use the language of Jason Maloy at Louisiana University, climate change is neither an emergency or a crisis; it is a political epic, “a process of collective human effort that features gradual progression through time, obscure problem origins, and anticlimactic outcomes.”
The best that we can say is that the world will continue slowly to decarbonize its energy system and, at the same time, the Earth will continue slowly to warm. And societies will continue to adapt to evolving climate hazards in new ways, as they have always done, with winners and losers along the way.
© Mike Hulme, January 2025
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Related:

Cambridge U. Climate Scientist Dr. Mike Hulme Denounces ‘Climate Emergency’ As ‘Noble Lie’
Mike’s publication record is expansive and involves many collaborators around the world. He maintains an active website where you can find his research and commentary.