Climate of disagreement

The initial reports speak of shadows of major disagreement. But the Climate Change summit in Copenhagen still has a week to go. And there still appears to be hope that a significant deal will be reached. But can that hope include eventual agreement about the science, the risks and the development aid?

Mike Hulme thinks not. He is Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia and leading a major EU project on adaptation and mitigation strategies. His recent book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge), explains why.

It is not just that the science, having so many variables, is complex and inherently not 100 per cent certain. No good science which is fuelled by the systemic use of doubt is ever that certain.

Nor is it just that the economics of climate change similarly have to deal with so many multiple issues that one solution may breed precisely outcomes one wished to avoid. For example, the rush to produce biofuels has led, in certain places, to a reduction in biodiversity and food security for the poor. Hardly sustainable development.

The entry of religion into the arena, of leaders from different religions making the subject a pet theme, is not just humbug or an indecorous rush for the bandwagon of relevance. Climate, as Mr Hulme shows, was never just a brute fact of "nature".

The use of the term climate to indicate mood or a human atmosphere, full of portent, is to be found in many languages and cultures. The Inuit ("Eskimo") of northern Canada use the same term to refer to the weather and to the spirit of the air, the mystic power that permeates all existence.

Climate also carries ideological baggage. Those Maltese used to explaining away hot tempers and excitable manners as somehow products of the Mediterranean environment (physical as much as cultural) may be surprised to find that, for a long time in European thought, it was the very temperate climate of the region that was invoked to explain its general cultural and economic superiority, as conducive to "temperate" rational reflection.

Once we acknowledge that climate carries cultural meanings, we can see why religions or any secular philosophy will not be enough to resolve disagreement. They are themselves divided by debates over who owes what to whom. On their own, they cannot resolve issues of duty to other people and the environment.

On the contrary, what happens is that we become more aware of the less obvious cultural biases slanting other areas. The transition from science to policy can never be purely technocratic, so discovery of anything less than 100 per cent technocracy (as some climate change sceptics have claimed on the basis of some illegally acquired e-mails) is not necessarily an unmasking of a conspiracy.

It is a mistaken idea of science - sometimes pushed by climate change advocates and politicians themselves - that it can offer results that lead to "self-evident" policy.

It cannot. The perception of risk depends on a prior assessment of nature's resilience and on a general background of trust (or distrust) in governance. Risk and fears are cultural, too.

Mr Hulme does not reach a fatalist or relativist conclusion that we cannot do or even know anything significant. On the contrary, he advises a practical, multi-level approach to the challenge, proceeding faster in certain geographical and industrial areas, which does not depend on a single beautiful blueprint being accepted by the entire world.

Most importantly, he points out that the key to a sustainable future is not to see climate change as simply a problem or threat, to which the answer is a solution. It is more than that.

Whatever our cultural bias and national interest, climate change is a challenge to every way in which we currently endow value upon things and ways of life. Because it asks us radically to revaluate our relationship to one another and the planet, climate change also asks us to revalue our values.

A hard-boiled free-market economist, for example, may still want to put a monetary value on everything, but putting a discount rate on the environment or a traditional way of life would still entail radical changes within the market because new public goods are being factored in.

Transvaluation will not mean that the current range of opinion will begin to converge. Wittingly or not, our current debates reformulate some classical myths: Eden (nostalgia of a lost natural balance); Apocalypse (ecological catastrophe); Babel (supreme confidence in humanity's ability to master climate and nature); and Jubilee (a climate settlement based on global and ecological justice).

These myths will not go away. But greater self-awareness of the reasons why we disagree about climate change would help us use these myths to advance thought, not short-circuit it; even to accept, perhaps, a common background against which we can debate the ethics and politics of climate change.

ranierfsadni@europe.com