Climate change: Scaring people will only yield scars and no solutions
Last week, the economics division at the ministry of finance in India invited Professor Mike Hulme at the University of Cambridge to share his views on climate change. In 2007, he received a personalized certificate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recognising his contribution to the (joint) award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC. His recent work, Climate Change Isn’t Everything piqued my interest, and I read it.
In the book, he decries “climatism," which he defines as an ideology that “naturalises" all the problems of the world in that they are all attributed to climate change. The dominant explanation for all social, political and ecological phenomena is a “change in the climate." Social, economic and cultural factors, policies and paths do not matter. The world is strewn these days with such an absolutist and exclusivist approach in many areas, of which climate change is the most prominent example.
Mechanisms such as doomsday clocks, climate-change cliffs and apocalyptic predictions of the end of the world have become so common that they have lost their power to demand our attention, let alone action. If alarmists were right, the world would have become extinct several times in the last decade or two. Such alarmism, far from motivating action to mitigate the effects of climate change and combat it, spreads panic and foments ‘climatism.’ On this, we have not learnt much, if anything, from our recent failures in dealing with the pandemic.
The costs of a total-lockdown approach to the pandemic are now being tallied. We are not done with it yet. The most striking outcome was the lost years of learning for children.
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