Climate Change: One, or Many?

Transcription

1 Climate Change: One, or Many? Mike Hulme Professor of Climate and Culture Department of Geography, King s College London mike.hulme@kcl.ac.uk Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference Trondheim, 9-11 June 2015

2 What is Climate Change? Climate change is the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen Climate change is the defining challenge of our age. The science is clear; climate change is happening, the impact is real Climate change is due to societal breakdown between [the Porgerans] and the rituals oriented toward powerful spirits that control the cosmos Global warming is the Earth s judgement on the global market Empire and the heedless consumption it fosters The threat of catastrophic global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people 2

3 The Plan (1) science will compel a convergence of people s worldviews around the need to take action (2) action to mean reducing greenhouse gas emissions to minimize human disturbance of the global climate system 3

4 One Global Climate? a complex, interactive system consisting of the atmosphere, land surface, snow and ice, oceans and other bodies of water, and living things 4

5 One Science? Bringing all knowledge together in one package, through one process, with one consensual message 5

6 One Assessment? Speaking with one voice IPCC media release, November

7 One Polity? Seeking a global mandate for a multi-lateral governance regime which encompasses all citizens and non-humans James C Scott 7

8 One Goal? The world s governments... recognize the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius 8

9 One Resistance? The dominant singular approach to climate change has fuelled a dominant binary framing of public debate notably in Anglophone cultures 9

10 One Thermostat? The social imaginary of the global thermostat presented as a singular solution to a singular problem 10

11 Many Climates

12 Many Knowledges

13 Many Polities Theocracy Autocracy Technocracy Democracy where Religion is dominant where Power is dominant where Science is dominant where agonistic debate is dominant 13

14 Many Goals

15 Many Publics Mary Douglas 15

16 Many Thermostat Settings

17 Can climate change be seen? After Rudiak-Gould (2014) the invisibilists the visibilists constructive visibilism 17

18 The invisibilists revealing climate change Because climate change is so hard to detect from personal experience, it makes sense to leave this task to climate scientists. This makes [it] a phenomenon where people have to rely on scientific models and expert judgment, and/or on reports in the mass media, and where their own personal experience does not provide a trustworthy way to confirm the reports. [APA Task Force Report, 2009] 18

19 The invisibilists

20 Attributing extreme weather

21 Scientific representations of future climate

22 Interactive scenario visualisation 22

23 The visibilists seeing with your own eyes In 2002, then Prime Minister Koloa Talake stated, Flooding is already coming right into the middle of the islands, destroying food crops and trees, which were there when I was born sixty years ago. These things are gone. Someone has taken them and global warming is the culprit....we have seen it with our own eyes. [Quoted in Rudiak-Gould, 2013: 125] 23

24 The visibilists seeing with your own eyes

25 The visibilists careful observations

26 Seeing climate change? Moteratsch Glacier, Switzerland

27 What is at stake in these different positions?

28 Constructive visibilism Climate change is neither inherently invisible nor inherently visible; it is, like all other objects, made visible [Quoted in Rudiak-Gould, 2013: 128] 28

29 Capturing climate change on film Photographer James Balog

30 Visual Representions

31 Fiction 2010 comic allegory of self-indulgent excess 2012 ecological enlightenment mapped onto female emancipation

32 Theatre The Contingency Plan, Bush Theatre, May 2009 The Heretic, Royal Court Theatre, London, early 2011 Earthquakes in London, summer 2010, National Theatre Greenland, early 2011, National Theatre 32

33 Music Planetary Bands, Warming World. sharing the science of climate change through music University of Minnesota,

34 Poetry Glacier Paul Munden Here and now Andrew Motion Meltwater Maggie Butt 34

35 Climate Change: One, or Many? Climate is an idea which encapsulates the immersion of the physical with the cultural, in which local and global dynamics interweave and where the memory of the past meets the possibilities of the future [Hulme, 2008] Vilsoni Hereniko 35

36 Professor Mike Hulme wires.wiley.com/climatechange

37 37

38 Many Publics WWViews embodied and projected not only a passive form of scientific citizenship, but also an image of the citizen shorn of any meaningful geographical, cultural, or political particularity [Blue & Medlock, 2014] 38

39 Pluralism plural, partial and provisional knowledge (V Brown, 2010)... plural and conditional advice (A Stirling, 2010)... plural climate ethics (M Kamminga, 2008) pluralistic communication (D Kahan, 2010)

40 IPBES Conceptual Framework (adopted Dec 2013) 40