At our 2015 STEPS lecture, Mike Hulme spoke on continuing disagreements on climate change, and his thinking on how they could be addressed in ways that take account of diverse cultures, perceptions and goals.
You can watch Mike’s lecture and view his slides via the links below. This lecture is part of the 2015 STEPS Centre Summer School.
From the lecture summary:
Climate change is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is reshaping the way people think about themselves, their societies and their Earthly futures. Climate change is therefore a major instance where scientific knowledge and symbolic imagination interact in multiple and complex ways.
In an earlier book, Why We Disagree about Climate Change, Mike Hulme considered the different ways people think about climate change in the contexts of science, economics, religion, psychology, risk communication, development sociology, and politics. In the six years since that book was published, new developments have occurred in nature, science, politics and culture, yet climate change continues to be an idea which both unites and divides us. In this talk he will consider why this is and what it tells us about the emerging narrative of the Anthropocene. My normative claim is that we need a variety of insights about climate and its cultural and political manifestations to offer a sufficient number of entry points for human actors to work creatively with the idea of climate change.