I hope you heard (or now watch) my 2021 conversation with the Cambridge University climate researcher Mike Hulme and science and propaganda historian Naomi Oreskes on trust and mistrust in climate science. The same goes for our 2023 conversation about his latest book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything, which describes what he calls “climatism” - a tendency in climate-policy discussions to put CO2 reduction in the foreground no matter what the issue is. I’ve loaded it above and here we are on YouTube: If you really want to dive in, explore my New York Times articles drawing on his insights as far back as 2007. But I also hope you’ll read this recent reflective essay he posted on his website - reposted here with permission. Hulme describes lessons that emerged through 40 years of climate scholarship and the evolution, and sometimes devolution, of public debate and related policies. I agree wholeheartedly with much of his reasoning. Maybe it’s because we’ve both been at this long enough to see patterns others miss in the rush to the new, and long enough to recognize when our initial internal narratives around climate change and energy transitions no longer match the evidence. Geopolitics, History and Climate Change: A Personal View by Mike Hulme “To think that we can draw some useful analogies from history dramatically underestimates the novelty and scale of the climate challenge.”[2] “In the contest between geopolitics and sustainable climate policies, the former takes precedence.”[3] 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. *** The crucial period which shaped my own (mis-)reading of the prospective power and salience of climate change in the twenty-first century—and many other people’s mis-reading; I was not alone in this—was the ten years between 1985 and 1995, now more than a third of a century ago. This period marked the apogee of optimistic thinking about “a new world order”—in the words of George Bush senior—and about “the end of history”—in the words of Francis Fukuyama. It was marked by the rise of market globalization, the triumph of liberal democracy over state-sponsored communism, and the blithe promise of a world energy transition. In short, this optimism was fueled by the rise of globalism; thinking strategically about climate change was caught-up in this zeitgeist. It was during these ten years that the dominant public narrative of climate change took shape, what Dan Sarewitz later called “the plan”.[6] “The plan”, according to Sarewitz, had two components: one, that scientific knowledge about climate change would lead to action by compelling a convergence of people’s worldviews around the need to take action; and, two, that this convergence of understanding would translate into a consequent convergence around what needs to be done. “The plan” appealed and gained pre-eminence among those who, like me, accepted Fukuyama’s unidirectional progressive view of history. In his famous 1989 essay, Fukuyama proposed that the post-Cold War era would see the replacement of “worldwide ideological struggle” with “the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”[7] Climate change seemed to be ripe for such technological solutionism; and many believed it. I did too. During those ten years, and leaking (just) into the twenty-first century, western values were casually presumed to be universal. And it was (just about) possible to imagine that the new harmony of nations might unite behind the primacy of America’s ‘benign’ world leadership. Forty years of Cold War had ended, 80 years of ideological struggle between liberal democracy and communism were over. It was, according to Fukuyama, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”[8] In similar vein, Beck’s “cosmopolitan manifesto” was published in 1998, inserting ideas about world citizenship and ethical globalization firmly into the western mind.[9] Yet this mood of optimistic globalism was dangerous. Writing retrospectively in 2023 about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the political historian Timothy Garton-Ash explains the danger: “…deep down we somehow thought – or more accurately, felt – that we knew which way history was going. This is always a mistake and one that historians should be the last people on earth to make.”[10] Around this time, the primacy of western science was reflected in the forging of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created by the UN in 1988, and first reporting in 1990, the IPCC gave the imprimatur of governmental backing to universal climate scientific knowledge as an authoritative guide to climate policy. The UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated in 1992, and ratified in 1995. Subsequent annual Conferences of the Parties to the Convention would hammer out the new institutions, policies and measures around which the world would unite to tame the climate change threat. It was an echo of how scientists had discovered the ozone hole in 1985 and how negotiators had crafted the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and its subsequent amendments, to repair the damage. Climate science’s ascendant power was eventually to lead to the IPCC receiving a joint share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. The new global science of climate change seemed to reign supreme. Yet by 2007, the illusion under which I had been working—that geopolitics would bend to the force of concern over climate change—was already ending. The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, ratified in 2004, had yielded next to nothing in terms of emissions reductions. Also running out of steam was Tony Blair’s campaign of international climate diplomacy conducted during the years 2003-2005, a self-conscious attempt to harness the moral high ground following the geopolitical disaster of the British Government’s support for the 2003 Iraq war. More significantly, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was the prelude to this disillusionment, and the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade Bill to pass in the US Senate in the summer of 2009 the main act. And the denouement came in December 2009 at COP15, billed as ‘the most important meeting in human history’. During a few days in a wintery Copenhagen, China’s growing political and economic muscle was firmly exercised, the impotence of the EU’s climate diplomacy revealed, and the limits of late twentieth century internationalism exposed. The curtain finally came down on Sarewitz’s so-called “plan” during the (northern) 2009/10 winter of climate discontent. In November 2009, the western world was blind-sided by the Climategate controversy over leaked emails between corresponding scientists, and in the early months of 2010 its confidence in climate science further undermined by several challenges to the IPCC’s trust and credibility. Meanwhile, the important geopolitical action was taking place elsewhere. While we weren’t watching, something else was afoot at the turn of this decade. The forces of deglobalization were gathering, coinciding with climate’s ‘cultural turn’—the belated recognition that science is not enough to drive change, that science is never enough[11]—and the beginning of the west’s cultural solipsism and fragmentation. The (short-lived) Arab Spring of 2011 culminated in the decade-long Syrian Civil War and fractious ethnic nationalisms gathered pace, first in Russia and then in the USA, Brazil and parts of eastern Europe. And all the while, China’s belt-and-road initiative was beginning to tighten. 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 wor
