Climate change: one, or many?

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Climate Change: One, or Many? Mike Hulme Professor of Climate and Culture Department of Geography Presidential Session: ‘Geographies of Climate Change’ AAG Annual Conference, Tampa, Florida, 7-11 April 2014

Transcript of Climate change: one, or many?

Climate Change: One, or Many?

Mike Hulme Professor of Climate and Culture

Department of Geography

Presidential Session: ‘Geographies of Climate Change’ AAG Annual Conference, Tampa, Florida, 7-11 April 2014

‘(1) science will compel a convergence of people’s worldviews around the need to take

action … (2) action to mean reducing greenhouse gas emissions to minimize human

disturbance of the global climate system’

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‘The Plan’

One Climate? “… a complex, interactive system consisting of the atmosphere, land surface, snow and ice, oceans and other bodies of water,

and living things”

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One Science?

Bringing all knowledge together in one package, through one process, with one consensual message

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One Polity?

Seeking a global mandate for a multi-lateral governance regime which encompasses all citizens and non-humans

7 James C Scott

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One Target?

The world’s governments “... recognize the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius”

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Mary Douglas

One Resistance?

The dominant singular approach to climate change has fuelled a dominant binary framing of antagonism – notably in

Anglophone cultures

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One Thermostat?

The social imaginary of the global thermostat – presented as a singular solution to a singular problem

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Climate Change: One, or Many?

“Climate is an idea which encapsulates the immersion of the physical with the cultural, in which local and global dynamics

interweave and where the memory of the past meets the possibilities of the future” [Hulme, 2008]

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Vilsoni Hereniko

Professor Mike Hulme www.mikehulme.org [email protected]

wires.wiley.com/climatechange