(Still) Disagreeing About Climate Change: What Way Forward?

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2010

M. Hulme, Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity, Cambridge University Press, London (2009)., 432pp

This working paper argues for a radical democratic approach to climate change. It begins by presenting and analysing various alternative approaches: ‘magical-technology’; ‘economic-market’; ‘ethical-individual’; ‘green-citizens’; ‘deliberative democratic’; ‘eco-authoritarian’ and ‘sceptical’ approaches. The aim here is to point out the existence of different, sometimes incommensurable perspectives, ideas, and values regarding climate change. These approaches all have valuable insights to contribute to the debate over climate change. However, the paper also identifies a common assumption held by proponents of these different approaches; that this highly complex environmental issue can only be tackled if disagreement is overcome or suppressed. The radical democratic approach, on the contrary, suggests that a legitimate politics of climate change demands strong decision making and collective action that requires not the closing down but rather the opening up of political disagreement. A radical democratic approach acknowledges the heated, contested socio-political climate surrounding climate change and attempts to put it to use in contemporary environmental policy making. This approach advocates the celebration of alternative perspectives rather than the suppression of opposition. To dismiss outright any opposing perspectives as ‘irrational’ is to stupidly preclude the democratic expression of disagreement and to risk enhancing extremist anti-democratic viewpoints. Instead of the dominant technocratic focus upon the scientific and economic ‘solutions’ to climate change, emphasis should be placed on the conditions in which to secure the expression of diverse opinions and the legitimate disagreements between them

Progress in Human Geography, 2011

St Antony's International Review, vol 5, no. 2, 2010

The world has never faced a challenge as complex and as difficult to address as climate change. At a fundamental level, it raises the question of how we produce and consume energy in all aspects of human activity. The causes and implications of climate change are manifold, and the associated distributional issues—between developed and developing countries and over the relationship between current and future generations—make it an exceptionally difficult problem to address politically.

SCIREA Journal of Environment, 2021

The current global warming context is being experienced by world populations through the extreme whether events, sea level rise, loss of biodiversity, increase rise of temperature, re-insurgence of climate-related diseases and important slow and sudden-onset environmental catastrophes enhanced or accelerated by climate change among others. In such context, the global community, supported by evidenced science research are relentlessly calling for urgent climate actions to avoid reaching the point of non-return. Unfortunately, despite the fact that our planet continues to be under such threats of irreversible climate destruction, a fraction of scientists and political leaders motivated either by their nostalgic attachment to the carbon-driven developmental era or pushed by the fossil fuel industry and its influential capacity on decision-making processes and decision-makers, continue to develop negationist theories, with the aim of creating skeptical mindsets and maintaining some doubts in public opinions as far as the very fact of global warming and the role of human activities in the occurrence of such warming are concerned. In such controversial context, it is more than ever important to revisit the key drivers of the climate crisis, the historical path that led not only to the climate conscience building, but also and above all to its gradual politicization, and the key ideologies supporting the positions of both climate change defenders and climate-skeptics and deniers. This article, using a combination of bibliographic research and descriptive methodologies, intends to investigate that historical path and cover the resulting knowledge gap, through an ideology-based and chronical presentation of facts.

“We constantly create, recreate and change structures” (D. Inglis 2012, Ernste 2016). In this paper the value of bilateral agreements for climate change adaptation will be discussed in light of Jürgen Habermas’ theory of Communicative Rationality and the Theory of Risk Society. The aim is to identify what parties are involved in climate politics and bilateral climate agreements, what discourses are interacting and play an important role here, and how bilateral agreements can change climate change mitigation and adaptation. Risk Society theory poses an interesting and seriously contrasting frame for the climate change and sustainability discussion and social-natural relationship of it. A moral commitment to climate change mitigation and the enabling of climate and nature protecting (bilateral)agreements is in a sense hard-edged politics. Manufactured risk like climate change shifts the discourse of collective and individual responsibility. Manufactured Risk and Risk Society have some serious implications for political agenda’s all over the world.

The politics of climate change is not concerned solely with rival scientific claims about global warming but also with how best to govern the climate. Despite this, categories in climate politics remain caught up in the concepts of the ‘science wars’, rarely progressing far beyond the denier/believer-dichotomy. This article aims to nudge climate politics beyond the polarized scientific debates while also counteracting the de-politicisation that comes from assuming scientific claims lead directly to certain policies. First existing typologies of climate political positions are reviewed. Diverse contributions make up an emerging field of ‘climate politology’ but these tend to reduce climate politics either to views on the science or to products of cultural world-views. Drawing on policy analysis literature, a new approach is outlined, where problem-definitions and solution-framings provide the coordinates for a two-dimensional grid. The degree to which climate change is considered a ‘wicked’ problem on the one hand, and individualist or collectivist ways of understanding political agency on the other, provide a map of climate political positions beyond ‘believers’ vs ‘deniers’.

Climatic Change, 2014