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Podcast Host
Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by.
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Professor Mike Hulme
The London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Event Moderator
Thank you very much everybody for coming for tonight's event which is sponsored partly by the Hayek program at the lse. We are delighted to see you all here and we're also delighted to have Professor Mike Hume who is a well known geographer who has been writing on climate related issues for many years. He has worked primarily at the University of East Anglia, King's College London and now Cambridge where he's a professor of Human geography. Mike is one of the most influential writers on the social understandings of climate change. His work has contributed largely to IPCC reports, but he has also various additional works on climate which are worthy of great attention. He has a great book, a great website full of papers and information and one interesting thing on that is his review of books written in particular years in the past. And the ambition is to do one year book to do a review of a book published in each year for 50 years. And Mike is now up to 1998. And the essence of this is to take books which are writing about an argument about climate change, not just an edited collection, in order to get the sort of zeitgeist of a time, to get the sort of flavor of how people were talking about climate at certain times in the past. Now Mike's new book, Climate Change Isn't Everything, is also available for sale outside after the talk. And the suggestion is that if you want to buy it, you go outside, buy it, come back in here and Mike will write in it for you if you wish. So this is going to be an exciting event. I should also mention that we have some online people listening. Welcome to those. So the plan will be I will pass over to Mike, Mike will talk and then Professor Liz Robinson will then have a response and then we'll go to questions from the audience and from online. And by the way, I should say who I am, my name is Tim Forsyth. I'm the head of department of the International Department of International Development. I've been writing on climate change, in particular about the representational risk within environmental assessments and how that is relevant for international development or not. So with no further ado, over to Mike. Thank you very much.
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Professor Mike Hulme
Thank you very much, Tim. And thank you to Brian for inviting me to give the lecture this evening, Epistemic Pluralism and Climate Change. So let's see where we go. So last November marked the 29th Annual Meeting of the Parties to the UN Climate Convention. It's been a long journey from COP1 in Berlin in the spring of 1995 to last year in Baku. Last year also saw the Earth's climate continue to warm, exceeding at least for one year, at the very least 1.5 degrees above the pre industrial temperature, which is the symbolic and aspirational limit that the world's nations agreed 10 years ago in Paris to endeavor not to exceed. So 20 years on from that first gathering in Berlin, we might well ask, is climate controllable? Can it be governed? Or more popularly, can climate change be stopped, whether at 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees or any other temperature threshold that you might want to select? And this for me that question can climate be governed? Is the one that I think has come to dominate. Well, for me it's the most important question in relation to the relationship between knowledge, politics and public discourse around climate change. Now, human societies have often desired to to control their climate. If you go back historically, we can find lots of evidence of this, as environmental historians have showed us. And societies have often speculated about means and ways in order to do that. There's a great book by Jim Fleming called Fixing the sky from 2010. But the aims of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement now place global climate governance in line of the many and varied projects that James C. Scott in his 1998 book Seeing Like a State, regarded as symptomatic of what he called high modernism. For Scott, these are projects that seek to govern the world through enumeration, state planning, regulation, whether these be through the state control of territory using the technology of cartography, the control of people through censuses, or of the economy through national accounting systems and management of gdp. From a historical perspective, Scott in this book tells the story very well. But with respect to climate, we now have visual evidence all around us of this new high modernist, in Scott's terms, ambition, which is to control global climate. So just consider these examples. That slogan, you control climate change from the EU in 2006, seeking to encourage citizens to change their behavior, to take control. Or we have the conceit embedded in the recently self appointed Earth Commissioners and their launch from nearly two years ago. The safe and just earth system boundaries for climate, biodiversity, freshwater, nutrients and aerosols. What was surprising in this launch from the Earth Commissioners was how they took the 1 number of global temperature, in fact arguing that 1 degree of warming above the 19th century, how that 1 number has come to stand in for either securing or not securing all of these goals and ultimately for climate justice. Well, then there's the soaring hubris of the Earth system science community and their plans to construct digital twins of Earth. So the EU have pumped billions of euros into this, the U.S. as well, at least up until a few weeks ago. I'm not quite sure what Trump is going to say about that. But destination Earth, the EU's effort to build a digital twin, this will unlock the potential of digital modeling of the Earth system at a level that represents a real breakthrough in terms of accuracy, local detail, access to information, speed and interactivity. So this modernist project, what I call this modernist project of controlling the world's climate, faces a problem. And it's a problem that becomes clearer year by year. It's the problem of credibility. So it's this problem of climate change that I'm interested in exploring in this lecture this evening. It's not the problem of a changing climate per se. The fact of a changing climate is a physical reality that we face and will continue to face for the foreseeable future. And for the unmasking of that reality, scientific knowledge has made an essential contribution. There's no question about that. Rather, what I'm interested in then is this altogether larger problem. I think that our aspirations, goals, targets and policies for controlling climate, for seeking to control climate representing more than 40 years of collective effort, do not appear to have achieved very much. Now, in a different time and context, the German emigre to the United States and political theorist Hans Jochen Morgenthau identified this credibility problem in his 1946 book Scientific man and Power Politics. Writing in the immediate post war period, Morgenthau said, here, as you can see on the screen, two moods determine the attitude of our civilization to the social world. Confidence in the power of reason as represented by modern science to solve the social problems of our age, and despair at the ever renewed failure of scientific reason to solve them. We can jump forward to our present time and to the issue that concerns us this evening, which is climate change. That wasn't Morgenthau's problem, but it is ours. And so we have sustainability scientists Sanda van der Le and Gary Dirks from Arizona State University writing something very similar to Morgenthau in their provocative essay from last year titled the Illusion of Control. In that they say, why? Why, while our societies have had increasingly detailed information on the state of the climate and the environment for the last 40 years, is it proving so very difficult to actually respond adequately to the sustainability conundrum? It would appear then, I'm suggesting that there is something in our reading of reality that is not quite right. It would seem that how we think about the relationship between climate knowledge, strategy and policy is not well calibrated against the realities of the world that we find ourselves in. And so here we might turn to a contemporary of Morgan Tao, the political economist Friedrich von Hayek, and whose name has been given to the program which sponsors this evening's talk now. In the 1940s, Hayek confronted a different challenge to ours. Rather than the ambition to steer the world's climate, for Hayek it was the problem of national economic planning and how to construct a rational economic order. As he explained in this essay from 1945, the use of knowledge in Society. He says, the problem is that knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all separate individuals possess. So Haig argued that central economic planning was not feasible because knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed and often held tacitly among many different people and political actors. There was no all knowing economic mind that could bring about the desired rational economic planning. Hayek explained his skepticism of centralized knowledge. Thus, if it is today so widely assumed that selected experts will be in a better position with respect to relevant knowledge, this is because one kind of knowledge, namely scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in the public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind of knowledge that is relevant. And even with respect to specifically scientific knowledge, which Hayek certainly did not despise, and I'm not despising it either. But even with respect to scientific knowledge, he said, it may be admitted that a body of suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best knowledge available. Though this of course is merely shifting the difficulty to the problem of selecting which experts. And just as an aside here that seems to me that observation in a nutshell perfectly captures the problem of expertise that those of us in science technology studies have spent the last 30 years grappling with. Yes, we want experts, but which? And who? And who controls the experts? Hayek's view is that the national economy, and this of course, was his concern, not climate. His concern was the national economy is a complex system. Well, so is climate, knowledge of which possessed endemic uncertainty and ignorance. So too with climate, uncertainty is endemic, ignorance is prevalent. Given that view, he therefore asked the central question, what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people, how best to utilize knowledge? This, I believe, is one of the central questions then that we need to ask with respect to climate change, I use Hayek's thinking from the 1940s about centralized and dispersed forms of economic knowledge as a starting point for my argument this evening that we need to think about climate change in more fragmented and dispersed ways. One particular epistemology, that of science, has come to dominate the way we think about climate change. Yes, science has revealed the extent of human influence on the physical climate system. This was the task of the climate science that I contributed to during the first half of my career, from the 1980s through to the early 2000s. But this hegemony of scientific rationalism, or to use another word favored by Hayek, scientism, has led to the problem of climate change being structured and understood in a very particular and perhaps not very helpful way. Using Sheila Jasanoff's idea of co production, how we know the world and how we act in the world are mutually constitutive. This is what Jasanov means by co production. In other words, apprehending climate change. How we apprehend climate change, through the science of a global Earth system, inevitably frames the strategy and shapes the policies that have been proposed to restrain climate change. And so, in what follows, I will suggest that we need to think about the relationship between climate knowledge, strategy and policy, and to suggest we rein back our ambition to govern the world's climate and to fragment and diversify our policy goals. This is where I want to take you this evening. I will argue for epistemic pluralism and for associated communicative goal and ethical plural pluralism. This leaves room, I suggest, for Hayek's forms of dispersed knowledge to be recognized and mobilized. And it loosens the epistemic straight jacket we've created for ourselves by relying on an exclusively scientistic paradigm. When we frame, communicate and execute climate policy interventions, I believe epistemic pluralism will help us move away from exhortatory or incantatory climate governance. Those phrases are from Stefan Aykeut's formulation, the political Scientist. It moves us away from incantatory climate governance, which rests on the illusion of rational and centralized control of the Earth's climate system. Interestingly, given its hegemonic status in the knowledge politics of climate change, the ipcc, in the Governmental Panel on Climate Change, has recently begun to take a move in this direction. Although such a move by the IPCC is only one part of my proposed corrective to the deficiencies of epistemic monism, we'll come to this IPCC maneuver towards the end of the lecture. So I want to start by suggesting then that the origins of our misadventure with climate governance can be traced back to the legacy of, of the creation of the IPCC by the United nations in 1988. In the years that followed, the IPCC has grown in weight, literally, given the sheer size of its reports, its salience and its power, both epistemic power and political power. The six successive reports of the ipcc, the seventh is now just underway, constitute the largest exercise of knowledge structuring, integration and centralization that the world of science has ever embarked on. I don't think Hayek would be impressed if I read him correctly. And if we go right the way back to the first IPCC report in 1990, we can see the forcing function of the IPCC's scientific consensus very evident. This is a quote from Sir John Horton, who chaired the first working group one of AR1 in 1990. And this was in the preface to that report. And Horton said, although there's a minority of opinions we have not been able to accommodate, the peer review has helped ensure a high degree of consensus amongst authors and reviewers regarding the results presented. This assessment is an authoritative statement of the views of the international scientific community at the time. This is framed precisely in terms of scientific authority and over successive assessment cycles, the encoding of this scientific knowledge that the IPCC produced in integrated Assessment models, or IAMS for short. The encoding of this knowledge in iams has become ever more formalized. These are analytical tools for guiding policy and the reach and the power of these models has grown with each successive IPCC report, with critics increasingly pointing out their overblown influence not just on the ipcc, but on the way in which governments formulate policy, their overblown influence. They also criticize the very small number of institutions that control these IAMs and their lack of transparency with regards to the assumptions that go into them. Iams, integrated assessment models are the very opposite of what I take to be Hayek's idea of dispersed and decentralized knowledge. They are concentrated and centralized. So with the IPCC and its science based assessments taking center stage in climate knowledge making, we have subsequently witnessed the discourse, rhetoric and the structuring of climate change. Politics and policy take very particular forms, forms that are shaped by by this elevation of science to the top of the hierarchy. Let me give just a few examples of this structuring over the last 30 or so years. I use here Dan Sarewitz's work, again from Arizona State University and his formulation of the plan. This was in a 2011 article. He characterizes the plan that formed the foundation back in the 1990s of how science and policy should relate to each other around climate change. The two components of this plan was the first that knowledge, scientific knowledge through the IPCC would lead to action by compelling convergence of people's worldviews around the need to take action. The stronger the consensus from the scientists, the stronger the public response would be. The second part of his plan was that this action, this convergence of understanding would translate into the consequence convergence around what needed to be done, namely reducing fossil fuel emissions through targets and top down targets and timetables. So the plan emerges. Then I argue from this point particular structuring of the problem. We also see this maneuver at various stages over the last few decades. I take these examples from the outcome of the Planet Under Pressure conference in London that was held in 2012 that was the launch pad for what is now called Future Earth. And here, and this is as it were, a sort of a consequence of Saroitz's thinking that the importance is for scientists to speak with one voice. And as the outcome of that conference here to build a sustainable world require consensus required for the effective action at national and global scales. There is no other viable way forward, says Mark Stafford Smith, who was the secretary for that conference. And as a consequence of that, a couple of years later we had the Earth League vision and here again we have this top down operationalization of the plan. Scientists speaking with one voice, saying what governments must do, what must governments do? The carbon budget must we need to every country must we must we must we need, we must, we must. Here is a form of concentrated centralized knowledge constructed on the premise that action will follow, that control of the global climate is prerequisite. On that assumption, we'll take another example here. The call for a unified narrative. This was from I think three authors, I think Mark Bushel, who was at King's College London at the time 2015. The call for a unified narrative. Again, a consequence of this line of thinking. If you're going to have a plan and you're going to speak with one voice, then actually what the world needs is to unite. And this was the way they articulated this. The world needs to unite around a strategic narrative, a single strategic narrative. They actually took this line of thinking from strategic studies, military studies, they were in the Department of War Studies or Elise Bushell was at King's College London. And with a single unified narrative that the world will organize around, all the relevant stakeholders must be engaged in crafting the story. An exciting, interesting document that tells the narrative, a single unifying narrative. This also leads to this type of thinking, what I call gap filling, drawn from a piece I wrote a few years ago. And. And this particular predominance of scientistic thinking around climate change leads to a linear view of gap filling that to complete that knowledge, it's the gaps in our scientific understanding of Earth system dynamics that needs to be completed that will eradicate, will squeeze out uncertainty, it will disperse ignorance, it will lead to the type of thinking that has producing now these digital twins of the Earth, this idea that knowledge behaves in this sort of linear progression very different. And I won't go into these other constructions here, very different from the sort of what I saw contingent view of gap killing, which I would suggest is more typical of social sciences, or the interpretative view of gap filling, which I refer to as thickening, which I take to be more characteristic of the humanities. I won't explore those. What I'm focusing on here is this sense that actually it's the linear view of gap filling. We need more knowledge, we need to fill the gaps, we need to eradicate uncertainty that allows the plan to be executed. And I could also throw in the same set of consequences from a particular structuring of the problem of climate change. The idea of the energy transition. And I sort of draw now on Jean Baptiste, an environmental historian, Freso his recent book here more and more and more an all consuming history of energy, what he refers to as the miss selling of the energy transition. The seductive power of this energy transition is immense, says Fresso. He's very skeptical about the ease or the inevitability of with which such an energy transition has been articulated over the last 20 or 30 years. This energy transition is somehow an inevitable next stage of a determinist history that the world will move towards. And as he says, it's all very well to mock the supposed techno solutionism of engineers, but the normative positions on climate that prevail in the social sciences are even more ridiculous, says Fraser. And then my final stop on this little section here is it leads to this type of thinking that if the world is going to unite around a single goal driven by a scientistic paradigm with a single narrative, whether 1.5 or 2 degrees. And if all else fails, we just go down the route of re engineering the Earth's climate using brute force technologies. We can actually bypass all of the problems of human social, political, cultural dissensus and just put the thermostat in the sky with aerosols that will shield the Planet from excess heat, the sun dimmers. Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge proposing this as well. So these are in my thinking then, these are some of the characteristics that this particular form of structuring the relationship between knowledge and policy around the hegemony of science and the foregrounding of a single goal at a single narrative it leads to. And it's on that basis then that I put into play this idea, what I call climate reductionism. These various maneuvers that I just summarized, and others as well lead to what I call climate reductionism, or indeed to my more recent book that Tim mentioned at the very beginning. Climate change isn't everything. What I call the ideology of climatism, climate reductionism, which climate reductionism is summarized Here in my 2011 paper, the form of analysis and prediction which climate is extracted from the matrix of interdependencies that shape human life. And then once you've isolated climate from those interdependencies, you make your predictions of what the climate will be 20, 40, 100 years into the future, and it becomes the dominant, shaping, controlling variable. The ideology of climatism draws this further forward. As my book will explain, the goals of climate policy are about managing the risks of a changing climate reduced to this single goal of controlling global temperature and its derivative net zero. We may come to that a bit later on. So just to illuminate this, the argument about climate reductionism. Yeah, there we go. The climate change isn't everything book from 2023. Let me just drive this home again with three or four examples of what I mean by this. So in a climate reductionist world, global temperature does become the control variable. Global temperature is the index that measures, that stands in for, as a proxy for the health of the relationship between the earth's climate and the earth's people. As that temperature index goes up, that relationship deteriorates. As the index comes down, that relationship improves. That's the logic behind focusing solely on global temperature as this index. And we've seen the way in which this has evolved in successive COPs, most recently of course, Paris in COP21. Climate reductionism also lies behind, it seems to me, this move towards integration of all knowledge, certainly the integration of all scientific knowledge. And here again I'm back to these. The structuring powers of the integrated assessment models. But also this hubris behind the idea of the digital twin, the creation of the earth's digital twin. Symbolic of this desire for control, the scientific knowledge that's being produced is encoded with, literally encoded within the algorithms and the computational power that exists within these mimics, these mirrors of the Earth, they offer these digital twins, and they're sold to funders on this basis, as I said, over a billion euros in the eu, hundreds of millions of dollars in the us. They offer the illusion of control, and they're emblematic of this. And here I'm using the language of van der Lure and Gary Dirks again in their article about the illusion of control. They offer this illusion of control and they're emblematic of the reduction in the cognitive dimensions in the Western world. In their words, the dimensionality of the phenomenon referred to by narratives has been declining. So this is an epistemic reductionism, if you will, or a cognitive reductionism that somehow these simulation devices will give us all of the information and the knowledge about the future, future that will be necessary in order to bring the world's climate under control. And of course, that trajectory that lies behind Digital Twins has a much broader stream of power behind it, which is the move towards artificial intelligence, which takes us off into another direction. But I don't think these things are entirely disconnected. We're handing over power to instruments or tools or technologies or intelligences that squeeze out, eliminate, don't even recognize the human or the dispersed forms of knowledge that Hayek talked about. I think this climate reductionism also manifests itself in other ways as well, what I call the science first approach to thinking about climate change. And here we've got iconic voices from both young and old, actually old and deceased. Apologies, Dr. Pochari died a few years ago. But nevertheless, the way in which science is foregrounded here as being the starting point, listening to the scientists, an understanding of science is the essential prerequisite for enacting efficient and effective and desirable action in the world. And I would say that we see this in slightly more shaded ways as well in other pronouncements. Just over Christmas this year, Nature, Nature magazine, the science journal, published an editorial expressing the fear of science losing its seat at the top table, recognizing the limits of science and reason in relation to geopolitics, but also arguing for finding ways to put science back into its rightful place. What I say, and to quote here, overall, the system that scientists use to access and influence UN environmental agreements is under strain. Well, that certainly is true. We see that, don't we, very much. In these last weeks meeting organizers, delegates and leaders of research institutions must find a way forward together. Fine. However, what they go on to say is science based decision making is what will ultimately help the world resolve the the crisis it faces. It's important to understand how and why research is being pushed to the margins. I agree we need to understand how and why that is happening and what it needs to be done to get policy back on track. This is a more subtle argument, but I still see here this elevation, this presumption, this ascendancy of science being the essential framework, the centralized forms of knowledge that will be necessary. And this science first approach here that I tried to articulate here, the science first approach to climate politics and policy shows that it seems to me that science is focused on the goals of political action relating to climate change, but it's not focused on the conditions of that political action. And so the Nature editorial can be bewildered, can be astonished, can be flummoxed by why this is happening, because science does not pay attention to the conditions that enable political action to be enabled. So disputes around climate change have too often been reduced to scientific or technical questions. Sociopolitical and cultural questions get relegated. And then we also see this in climate reductionism or climatism, as I talk about in my book, this fetishizing of deadlines and cliff edges. We've had an abundance of these over the past 25 years, driven by a scientific analysis of what has to be done by a particular date to achieve a particular global temperature, all of which, all of these deadlines have come and gone. And when these deadlines are repeatedly missed, the psychological effect is cynicism, despair or apathy. There are only so many moments of decision that are believable before they become unbelievable and they lose whatever galvanizing force they might once have possibly had. Here's a recent one, one from the UNFCCC's chief executive, Simon Steele, in his speech last year. Two years to stop climate change. Two years to save the world. Two years this was so we've already 12 months has virtually gone already. And another work that I've done with colleagues here, this is an image of ticking clocks as well, of course, the visual metaphor of the ticking clock. We see it all over the place, whatever the countdown is, 2 years, 10, 10 years, 12 years, whatever. A more fundamental problem I've written about with colleagues with deadlineism is that it might incite cynical cry wolf responses or undermines the credibility of climate science when an anticipated disaster or ending or tipping point does not happen. And then, to complete this little section of illustrating what I mean by climatism, take this maneuver that we've seen over the last six years, six or seven years declaring climate emergencies. These have proliferated around the world and across our social and political Institutions from global right the way down to the micro scale schools or universities join in by declaring emergencies. In fact, I came across this back. Tim mentioned the beginning of this little project I've got going on my website about writing a review of a seminal book in each of the years of the last 50 years. The one I did for 1997 was Ross Gelbspan's book the Heat Is On. He was an American journalist who in the mid-1990s brought the focus, in particular quite a popular, pioneering piece of environmental journalism by calling out the Global Climate Coalition and some of the fossil fuel industries and the tactics that were being used by the fossil fuel industries. That's by the way. But what was interesting is that it was one chapter in his book in 1997 that he called the coming permanent state of emergency and the requirement, as he saw it on the back of that, for some sort of dictatorship. Well, we've got a permanent state of emergency. If we believe all of these declarations, are we also going to be seeing some sort of dictatorship in order to manage that emergency and to bring it to a conclusion? And I think the dangers here, and I've written about this elsewhere as well, the dangers of declaring climate emergencies. We can actually return here to Hayek in his serfdom thesis. I think this is almost exactly what he was alluding to in his famous serfdom thesis, as he said, emergencies. Emergencies, he says, have always been a pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded. And here a nice backup of this from Aldous Huxley later in his life, reflecting back on his earlier novel Brave New World. Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing or even near a war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of a central government. Be careful what you wish for would be what I would say when declaring emergencies. So this is. These are examples of what I regard as this particular structuring of the problem where one elevates scientific knowledge in centralized and unifying forms. It leads to climate reductionism, it leads to climatism. What to do as I come towards a conclusion, how can epistemic pluralism, multiple forms of knowledge, inquiry and judgment, help liberal democracies better address the intertwined challenges of climate change, social justice and political freedom. Why is my advocacy of dispersed knowledge, or Hayex, advocacy of dispersed knowledge applied to economic planning? Why actually might it apply here as well? I point then to three elements perhaps of what might be needed, given the sunk costs in the existing framing and problem structuring of climate change, both epistemically and politically, I cannot say I'm optimistic that such changes will occur. But given the frustrations of the knowledge gap that I reported earlier, but from Morgantown in 1946 and Vandeleur and Dirks in 2024, and the credibility problem, as I see it, perhaps at least we might begin to try firstly to loosen the whole of science within IPCC assessments or other institutional ways of embracing, I'll say a word about that, loosen the illusion of control over the earth's climate and to actively promote problem fragmentation and diversification of policy goals with the ipcc. And I mentioned this earlier on, and what's quite interesting is that at its 62nd plenary meeting just two weeks ago in China, the IPCC agreed to an IPCC workshop in the autumn, New and Extended Methods of assessment in AR7. And what was particularly interesting here is that the embrace of the IPCC in what they refer to here as indigenous knowledge systems, local knowledge and practitioner knowledge, this has been a long time in coming. I and others have been arguing this for 15 years. But it's interesting that the IPCC is explicitly wanting to move away from its science first paradigm of knowledge. And I think this is again consistent with this idea of fragmentation, dispersed forms of knowledge, recognizing that many of the knowledge holders in society are not formally accredited experts, but maybe have tacit forms of knowledge, other forms of knowledge that might be relevant. And this therefore means to extend, to expand this knowledge base to the arts, religious knowledge, stories, metaphors, a much wider range of narratives. And one of the books here I mention here by Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig, Story Narrative Evidence of Public Reasoning, is a very good example of what this might mean, actually elevating stories to forms of public evidence. When we talk about evidence based policy making, actually stories, narratives that hold cultures and human imagination may actually be very important pieces of evidence that policy makers need to take into account. I'm speeding up here a little as we get to the conclusion. This is the second point then, about loosening the illusion of control. Yeah. So here, you know, again, we can actually find various voices that come to our aid here. And actually Hayek's antagonist from the 1940s, John Maynard Keynes, he and Hayek would broadly agree on this. If we take this concern that caution from Keynes very carefully. Our powers of prediction are slight, our command over results infinitesimal. As I've written elsewhere about the moral logic of carbon metrics, this is a dangerous form of what I call carbon utilitarianism similar in principle to reducing all human moral reasoning to the positive logic of science. So we need to loosen this illusion of control that science, prediction and digital twins seems to entice us with. It takes us down this line of recognizing plural knowledge systems, what Andy Sterling calls plural and conditional advice, recognizing that ethical systems are multiple and diverse and need to be brought into the conversation, and also pluralistic forms of. Of communication, as Dan Gahan would explain it. And this leads to the consequence of this, which is the fragmentation of policy goals, more modest ambitions than the high modernist projects of trying to bring climate under direct human management. This is what Charles Lindbergh's famous the Science of Muddling Through, I think alludes to. And then linked to this is Eleanor Austin's argument about polycentrism that's been around now for a couple of decades. Be better to self consciously adopt a polycentric approach. And I think this is an important lesson for any defender of a democracy. And surely I would like to think that many of us would be wanting to be defenders of democracy, because in a world where lines of democratic accountability, such as they are, or such as they are not. But anyway, where such lines of democratic accountability reside, they are still national, predominantly. And the danger is to talk of climate change policies and ambitions in terms of earth system governance, transnational control systems and regulations that don't sit well for those who already might be skeptical of the value and the validity of democratic institutions. So my final slide, what I'm arguing here then is that dealing with the challenge of a complex climate system which is subject to the human forces of change and disturbance, it's a system that encompasses both the physical and the cultural, political, imaginative worlds. Epistemic pluralism, I believe, is essential both in the way we think about knowledge making, knowledge mobilization, knowledge assessment and policy making. And I've suggested this on three grounds. First, it challenges the hubris of epistemic monism, which itself is the result of a cognitive reductionism, and the overconfidence that that leads to. As Nancy Cartwright, the philosopher of science, has recently put it, for one discipline or practice to claim, claim pride of place over the others is a mistake. This want of intellectual humility in the institutions of science can have disastrous consequences. My second ground is this is a view more consonant with what Hayek called the intersubjectivity that emerges through the agonistic clash of epistemes and values, which I think for political theorists is the lifeblood of a democracy. And then my final platform for resting this on is, I think it's actually closer to the reality of the physical climate system and the way in which humans interact with that climate system. This is the world of clumsy solutions muddling through polycentric governance. The mistake is that our knowledge making, our rhetoric and our public advocacy around climate change hasn't yet reconciled itself to that reality. Thank you.
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Podcast Host
Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
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Event Moderator
Thank you very much, Mike. Now I'm going to pass over to Liz Robinson.
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Professor Liz Robinson
Gosh, what a super interesting talk. Thank you. And I think we have enough time that I can talk a little bit about my response to the talk and the book. And, you know, we can have a little interaction ourselves and there'll still be loads of time for Q and A from the audience. So I'm going to say there's. There's things we agree on and things we disagree on, which I think is going to make this a more interesting talk. And I must say I've got the things we agree on which make me smile. And people who know me know that I'm quite a critic of iams. I can't even think integrated assessment models. Oh, just, just my background was probably positionality matters here. My background, my first degree is in engineering and my PhD is in economics. So, yeah, so I'm a critique of integrated assessment models for various reasons. I also, as my students know, I ban them from exhortations. I don't let them use the word must, should have to. So we definitely agree there. It's quite frustrating. I certainly think these sort of deadlines that we've sort of powered through are. Have been problematic because credibility's lost and a global dictatorship might help us solve the climate problem. But I don't think we really want it. So I smiled on all those thinking. Yeah. And I found your talk incredibly interesting. I must say, when I first saw the title, I had to look up what epistemic pluralism meant. And I was a little bit nervous about reading the book. But. But I understand what that means. You see, I've done my homework, but I understand what that means. So let's go where I think there's points of difference which I think will make the conversation more interesting because I am really interested to see how this pans out. But okay, so I'll backtrack a little bit. I kind of feel that sort of we woke up in parts of January 2025 feeling that we're sort of of in an Orwellian 1984 world. And you, you relate to a lot of literature. So I thought that's great because I was thinking about literature when I read your book and, and, but actually when I read your book I started thinking more Murakami. And I started thinking 1Q84. Who's read 1Q84? One person. Okay, so, so 1Q84. The, the point of the Murakami book is that there's sort of these two parallel worlds. And while I was reading this I did think, are Mike and I living in different, two very similar but slightly different worlds? And I thought to myself, do I know any climatists? You know, do I see climatism by your definition? And so I looked at and I cherry picked in your book. But I think, but I could argue you cherry pick examples here. So I thought, you know, do I know anyone that believes that preventing climate from getting worse will prevent everything from getting worse? And I thought, I don't think I know anyone who thinks that. So I don't think, does climatism really exist? And I see why you're creating this sort of idea because I think quite a lot of what you say a little bit of me agrees with, but I want to press back. And then I asked myself, are there any climate scientists who see the future as predictable? And I thought actually probably what climate scientists are really worried about is yes, we have lines projected into the future with our two degree worlds, our one point. But actually it's the error bars that get bigger and bigger that make us really worried. You know, it's the fat tails I think that we're very worried about. And I was just wondering if sort of Mike and I were both invited to go on one of Elon Musk's rocket ships. At what point would we say yeah, the risk's worth it, you know, so if there's a 2% chance of it blowing up, would we get on the rocket ship? And I wondered if part of how our different in thinking is I would just be really risk averse and I would not get on that rocket ship. And that maybe you'd get on the rocket ship when the odds were sort of in your favor, but not as in my favor as I'd need them to be. Because I think, you know, when we use 2 degrees and 1.5 as a shorthand, what we're really saying is this is a sort of precautionary principle. But also another thing that you raised in your talk and that comes up in the book is I don't think I've met a climate scientist who thinks only temperature matters. And so I don't think we're climate people are naive. So when we talk about 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees, most of us are horror. I know you gave some examples of people writing about it, but most of us are horrified by solar geoengineering. Most of us know that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is destroying nutritional value of crops. Most of us know that carbon dioxide dissolving in the ocean is causing problems, problems for corals, it's causing problems for, you know, mollusks where their, their shells are disintegrated. So 1.5 and 2 are shorthands, they are proxies. But I don't think we're naive. Now, there may be a question of when we talk to the general population, are we? Are, are we? Is that being interpreted the only thing that is mass temperatures? Because I think when we sort of think about solar geoengineering, most of us who are talking about it and having meetings about it, it talk about it because we're so horrified that people might do it because they say that that's the only thing left. So I'm not sure that in my 1Q84 world, which is a lot nicer than the Orwellian world we seem to be living in, in the real world, with everything that's going on politically, I'm not sure my world is quite the same as Mike's. I don't think that worries matters too much. The thing that really interested me of talking, that I hadn't picked up in your book was the word control. So I thought that was really interesting. And you sort of said, is climate controllable? There's a desire for control, there's an illusion of control. But I had never thought about the idea that we were trying to control the climate. You know, my very sort of, I'm economist, very simple souls. My very simplistic take on this is that we've been influencing the climate by burning a lot of fossil fuels very rapidly, by cutting down trees and by growing cows, and that we want to just sort of reverse that. You know, we want to stop influencing the climate because, you know, when did we last see 422 parts per million carbon dioxide, which is really what we're also worried about, about 3 to 5 million years ago. Are we a bit worried? Yes, we are. And, and then I just thought to myself, again, very simple economist, what do we really want to do? And much as I criticize integrated assessment models, and much as I don't believe a global carbon tax is really the solution, actually by having these models and by talking about things like a social cost of carbon, we are asking at the margin, what are the trade offs? And when we talk about adaptation versus mitigation, we are asking, is it better to put all our money into mitigation, all our money into adaptation, or a bit of both. And one of the sort of positive things about mitigation is that if we look at the world we live in at the moment. My Damascene moment was when I took my daughters on sabbatical to China. In 2015, China had the first red alert for air pollution. The air pollution was so thick you couldn't see anything. I thought if an alien was looking down on our earth and looking the way we live, they would like, you know, you've had this chance to grow rich by growing fossil, by burning fossil fuels, by cutting down trees. You know, you've got, you know, you're well fed because you get this good dense protein from meat. But you know, look at your rivers, they're polluted. Look at your air, it's polluted. Who would choose to do that? And it just so turns out that if we tackle air pollution, if we eat healthily and if we exercise a bit more and don't sit on our backsides for our jobs, actually that's the same thing we'd want to do as tackling climate change. So that was sort of my Damacy moment. But I thought to myself, and maybe then I'm agreeing with you, I don't know. There is a bigger question that the way we live our lives just doesn't make sense. And so there's a lot of benefits. A lot of people say this, that even if climate, climate change wasn't an issue, we would probably want to stop burning fossil fuels, we'd probably want to change our diets. We wouldn't want to cut so many trees down so we could feed soybeans to cows. We would actually care about animal welfare and we would ensure that people could walk outside in nice air and cycle safely and walk safely wouldn't have to depend on cars. So I'm not sure where that's going per se, but I just don't, I don't think we've ever talked. I'll go back to the point I was trying to make. I don't ever think people, when we talk about tackling climate change or trying to control the climate, we're just saying that we've been in this sweet spot for a long time as a planet in this sort of 250, you know, 350 parts per million of CO2. And it turns out that's a really nice sweet spot to be in. If we actually look at what temperatures would have been without us burning fossil fuels, the world would have been cooling a little bit. So a little bit of warming is actually quite nice. And I mean, you bring up in your book that the cold kills people, but really only in cold countries. And most people who really need to be protected are in hot countries. So when we see climate warming, we're not really seeing people protected from the cold in these countries, we're seeing people in hot countries where it's even hotter, harder to grow plants and things, crops and things. So I was just thinking, where do I sit? And I'm wondering, am I a monomaniac climate gladiator reviewing this book with suspicion? I mean, I don't think I'm a monomaniac climate gladiator. Do I view the book with suspicion? No. But I'm not sure the world you write about is necessarily there. I do think there's a conversation to be had about how we address climate change and how we solve climate change, but probably because I do think there's a sense of urgency, I think so I thought, what does the book and your talk and me boil down to? And maybe it just is, how fast do we need to move? Maybe it's just. Maybe that's actually the conversation that people like Mike and people like me kind of want to have. Certainly my own work, which you probably don't like because we have projections and things, but some of my work where we look at how climate change is impacting food security. Security. And it seems to be that it's just much, much harder to achieve your SDGs with climate change. And that's criticized that way of thinking. The book, I can handle that, and I'm happy for you to criticize me out loud, but what we're trying to say is that what we do really care about is poverty and inequality and there's, you know, various plans for SDGs. But I think it's quite important to know if that's going to be easier. Easier or harder with climate change. And I think it's kind of important to think about what's the best way to tackle this. Ask high income countries to reduce their emissions because we've got all the technologies for it, or just keep emitting because we can't be bothered not to. And then low income countries, it's just even harder for them to sort of try and achieve their goals. So this book got me thinking, that's got to be good. It got me engaging with what human geographs do. That's got to be good. We probably disagree with a lot of things, but hopefully what I've said will enable an interesting conversation. So, you know.
- [57:23]
Professor Mike Hulme
Yeah, thank you. And as someone who's written a book about why we disagree about climate change 15 years ago, I expect everyone in this room to disagree with me because actually it's out of this disagreement, this conversation, which is actually part of what I argue for epistemic pluralism, that actually we come at this whole question of climate change from very, very different places. I mean, literally places, looking around the room, I guess, and from different disciplinary traditions. And to follow my idea of pluralist ethics, I suspect our ethical systems are not all converging into one single ethical system as well. So actually these are exactly the conversations that have to be had and I feel had been feeling this now for nearly 20, 15 or 20 years have slowly been marginalized in this sort of dominant frame now. Okay, just a couple of quick things. I know Tim, you've got lots of questions, I'm sure, from people. I mean, who is a climatist? George Monbiot is a climatist. Simon Steele is a climatist in my terms, because they say exposure explicitly. If you don't stop climate change, nothing else matters. You can't achieve your SDGs unless you stop climate change. To me, that is climatist thinking. I do think you're right that a lot of this comes down to risk, perceptions of risk and how we evaluate risk. And again, people in this room will have very different risk heuristic frameworks for thinking about risk. And I suppose what I'm wanting to argue for is that unmitigated climate change clearly is a serious risk, but there are other serious risks out there in the world and we have to try to do some contextualization. So it's not just about putting climate change top, which is what George Monbier would do or Simon Steele would do. It's actually trying to understand how we've got different risk and economists can help us with that. Hence you get, you know, the Lord Stearns of the world, you know, 15 years ago, arguing with the Lomborgs of the world, because here are different economic calculus, which in effect have different risk profiles and different ethical assumptions. So I agree with you very much that risk is at the center of this. Maybe the other point here is I feel you're a little bit too, dare I say, complacent about solar geoengineering. I mean, this is a rapidly rising policy proposal and to me it gains huge amounts of fuel from this particular scientistic and reductive of thinking about what the problem of climate change is. Because if the control variable is temperature, then solar genes can do it for us. There's hundreds of millions, maybe even over the billion dollars now of research that's being commissioned on this on both sides of the Atlantic, including here in the UK with a new program under ARIA. Who's heard of ARIA, £60 million going to one program to explore solar geoengineering technology, including limited field trials under this DARPA type framework with very little public accountability at all. I discovered that it's not subject to Freedom of Information requests. DARPA area. So we can't actually find out what's going on if we want to find out. So these are. There's a momentum behind Solar G engineering. So I think I am more concerned about Cello G engineering. Maybe I'm horrified by it, but I.
- [61:04]
Professor Liz Robinson
Think Grantham has conversations about. We're really worried about the impact.
- [61:08]
Podcast Host
So we are.
- [61:09]
Professor Mike Hulme
There's a growing groundswell and maybe just the final thing. Co benefits. Yeah, co benefits. Yeah, this is. And again, we're sort of slowly coming into alignment here. This is about fragmentation of policy goals. So yeah, there are many co benefits of policies and I suppose that what I'm trying to do is turn this around and say it's not. We need to think about what are the wider co benefits of climate policies. What actually are the climate co benefits of other policies? So we actually start with a broader portfolio of objectives and goals, which are shorthand for SDGs. And then we can begin to see that some of these ways of dealing with some of the SDGs actually also have some climate co benefits as well.
- [62:00]
Event Moderator
I think at this point we should probably open the room to questions and I'm sure that Mike will have questions and possibly Liz as well. So what should we do? Should we take a few and then deal with a little cluster of maybe three questions? I'm seeing some very eager hands here at the very front, so. And then somebody there and then I'll come in the second round to some other people. And we also need to get some online questions as well. Maybe in a moment.
- [62:28]
Professor Mike Hulme
Thank you very much for your talk, both your talks. It's extremely interesting. Quick one from both your perspectives. How, how has. Looking back on Covid, that's an obvious case. I think quite analogous missteps in initial group think in terms of what policies might work and then the policy. Yeah. Sort of policy solutions and different governments, how those failed or not. And then, and then actually in this case, the sort of techno solution did win out. So just it seems to me that it seems a case of politics intersecting with a tiny community. So just interesting your thoughts.
- [63:05]
Podcast Host
Okay.
- [63:06]
Professor Mike Hulme
Hi.
- [63:06]
Podcast Host
Thank you. I wanted to push, push you a bit more, Mike, on what epistemic pluralism looks like. So I completely agree with your analysis about the, you know, the kind of dominant narrative and globalization sort of barreling.
- [63:21]
Professor Liz Robinson
Inevitably towards solar geoengineering. That seems that that's sort of one side of the coin, but maybe the other side of the coin is what.
- [63:29]
Podcast Host
We see at the moment on the other side of the Atlantic and a.
- [63:32]
Professor Liz Robinson
Very anti science agenda which.
- [63:34]
Podcast Host
Which is in danger of throwing away many of the insights that can be.
- [63:37]
Professor Liz Robinson
Gained from science and scientific knowledge.
- [63:41]
Podcast Host
So how do we find the middle ground? How do we promote epistemic pluralism in.
- [63:46]
Professor Liz Robinson
A way that can make sense to.
- [63:48]
Podcast Host
Both sides of that coin and find.
- [63:51]
Professor Mike Hulme
A positive way forward?
- [63:53]
Event Moderator
Thank you. And the final question.
- [63:54]
Professor Mike Hulme
And then.
- [63:55]
Podcast Host
Yep, thank you for the talk. I wanted to ask you what other sources of information or what voices, which stakeholders do we need to look to to hear more and explore more the epistemic pluralism and understanding of climate?
- [64:17]
Event Moderator
Thank you. Go for it.
- [64:19]
Professor Mike Hulme
The COVID one. Okay, here's another big thing. So I would say we saw very similar, I would argue very similar tendencies in the way in which Covid was dealt with. First of all, it's a risk, risk issue. And what I saw around Covid, and I'm focusing on the UK because that was where I lived during COVID I mean other countries may, but certainly in the UK the risk was elevated. It was the immediate goal. The immediate goal was to minimize hospitalization rates and you know, various things were enacted to do that immediately was locked down. Of course, a very rapid rollout of the vaccine. What never happened as I could follow the discussion was actually what are the consequences? What are the wider set of consequences of locking down a society for two months, four months, six months? What is the effect of a generational effect on young children, of being de socialised? We could look at the same thing with elders in care homes. I'm not saying here what the right policy is, what I'm saying is that I didn't see what I don't see happening in climate change, which is this risk comparison. And okay, you could say a techno solution won out, but it won out at huge cost to the economy, to mental health, to civil liberties, I would argue as well. So I think Covid, at the very best, has got very mixed lessons for us about how we tackle climate change. The other two questions are sort of connected, I think, if I've understood, which is this whole idea about development, diversifying knowledge. And this is an interesting one, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, Trump has got his own sort of epistemology. It's a Trumpian epistemology and no one understands it. So how far do we go? It seems to me we have to go quite a long way if we're taking our publics along along with us, who us are here. And you know, the interesting thing is we've seen this rise of diversity, dei, edi, whatever you want to call it, in terms of human resources and human skills. We also need to be thinking about the diversification of our epistemologies. Science is very good at doing things that science is very good at doing. We would not fully know that actually the scale of the impact of carbon dioxide emissions is what it is without science. So science is very good at doing what science can do. But there are other knowledge systems that are very good at doing what they can do, which science can't. And the idea of storytelling is one. The power of stories, narratives, the forms of religious knowledge and practice, practice that more than 80% of the world's population adhere to, or at least will articulate that they adhere to. These are deep knowledge systems, if you will, that are curated in particular places, in particular cultures over long periods of time. We may not like all of those religious knowledge cultures, but they are powerful. And if you're going to understand the reality, this is what I come back to at the very end here. If we simply see the lens through a digital twin, if that is reality that is being simulated, and the rhetoric is wonderful. I mean, how else would you get a billion euros out of the European Commission? The rhetoric is powerful. Of course these digital twins will improve decision making, of course they will. But they've got a very reductionist way of thinking about the human world that we live in. So at the very least, we have to give voice and recognition to other forms of human knowledge. Experiential knowledge, place based knowledge, indigenous knowledge, cosmological knowledge. I actually think the best example of this, maybe it betrays A little bit of my religious conceit is actually Pope Francis and if you read his encyclical, I mean 2015 and there was a rehearsal a few years later, but actually the 2015 was a really. And it's a holistic account of the problem we face in the sense that he pays due attention to scientific evidence. He's clearly got a very strong set of ethical and moral reasoning from social Catholic theology. It sits within this cosmology of Catholicism, but it's very attentive to the situatedness of particular people in certain places. The power gradients that exist in the world. That is a good example of what the IPCC hasn't done. It probably can't do that. And again, I'm very interested that there is a move within AR7. Maybe Arthur can tell me more. But there is a move within AR7 to very deliberately just open the cracks around the edges.
- [69:32]
Event Moderator
We've covered all the questions. Yes, okay, now I had one there and I'm going to take you. And I'm going to take you as well. So 1, 2, 3.
- [69:43]
Professor Mike Hulme
Thank you for this talk. I had a question in regards to power because the way how knowledge is mentioned here seems a lot that there isn't really any interest connected to these forms of knowledge. And I would be interested to hear a bit more about the role of power and how you see it. I'm specifically thinking about Andreas Malm and Wim Carton's book Overshoot recently that has similar context and sees them very much intertwined with power of capitalism and structures of capitalism. So I would like to hear more about this. Thank you.
- [70:19]
Podcast Host
Thank you for everything, for all the information given. I'm not kind of skeptical about current, the climate change, but I'm not even like, I'm not against, but not even for. I'm in between. However, my question is how to change the global approach that now is already initiated in all the global governments and try to push this peace approach, for instance. Thank you.
- [70:54]
Event Moderator
And we'll take the last question and if possible we'll have quick answers because we're running out of time.
- [71:02]
Podcast Host
Sorry.
- [71:02]
Professor Mike Hulme
Hello.
- [71:03]
Podcast Host
Thank you for your presentation. Just for context, I'm from the Philippines and so that's going to be where my question will be coming from. I had just wanted to ask what you would think about the fact that perhaps it might not be science per se, but the hierarchization of knowledge and about how, you know, like the prioritization of Western thought, of the hegemonic, of the hegemony of English and how that converges with the discussions on science. And so I guess that's very similar as well to the question on power, particularly because in the Philippines indigenous knowledge is science and that is very well entrenched in our understanding of scientific thought.
- [71:48]
Event Moderator
Thank you very much. We'll stick with those three questions. Quick answers if we can.
- [71:52]
Professor Mike Hulme
Well, I haven't read Malvin Carton's recent book, so I can't specifically comment on that. And the power, I mean, in a sense the power that I'm interested in interrogating is epistemic power, the power of different knowledge systems and how that knowledge that comes out of those knowledge systems, how that power is appropriated by different interest groups. And I think again from my approach as a, you know, I suppose as an analyst, as an academic, I'm trying to take a symmetrical approach to this, is to understand how these different knowledges are appropriated by political actors that I might choose to identify with, but also those that I may not choose to identify with. It seems to me that scientific knowledge as it's been formulated around climate change and the way in which commentators and advocates have mobilized that scientific knowledge have sometimes played into the hands of certain clusters of political actors that offered a hostage to fortune either an easy line of attack or at times claims that actually the scientific knowledge is being controlled by a small cabal. So I think the short answer is that's the line of power that I'm interested in analyzing. And I think too we have to look at this in the context of what forms of governance normatively we actually want to live under. And this is this whole question about democracy, authoritarianism and who controls the controllers? The Philippines. Yes. So I mean, we. This isn't place to get into discussions. What is science and what is non science? I mean, the more inclusive term is knowledge, at least in the English language, it's knowledge. I'm not sure how it would translate, but it's actually recognizing that, okay, there are many different sciences and we talk about social science and we may talk about indigenous sciences and maybe this is the line that the IPCC will go down in AR7 in a way to sort of get. Navigate its way through this. But I think it's about recognizing that knowledge exists in many forms. And that's what I'm wanting to foreground here. There was a third question about the global approach. Do you want to take that one? I suppose the bottom line is what I'm suggesting is that the global approach, I mean, this is something I didn't touch on, is going back into the late 80s, 1990s, how climate change got framed in a very particular way. Was it a particular moment in global history and geopolitical history? In the 1990s, it was the rise of internationalism, the new world order, the end of history. In Fukuyama's terms, we live in an entirely different world now, 30 years on, for all sorts of reasons, not least geopolitically. And an approach for a problem like climate change that might have made some sense in the 1990s does not necessarily make sense in the 2000 and twenties. So I suppose the corollary of my argument of epistemic pluralism is polycentrism, which is Elinor Austin's argument that we need to recognize that governance exists in many, many different settings on different scales, in different forms, and probably the global is no longer a very particularly powerful form of governance. And we actually need to start rethinking this in terms of more nationalistic, dare I say it, more nationalistic frames of governing. Here we're back to the diversification of goals. SDGs, nations have all signed up to the SDGs, whatever nation state you're in. And maybe just thinking of this in a slightly different scale dimension is what's warranted now.
- [76:07]
Event Moderator
We will be running out of time. We're ending up the hour, aren't we? So I'm going to take an online question or two from Brian.
- [76:15]
Professor Mike Hulme
One.
- [76:16]
Professor Liz Robinson
All right.
- [76:16]
Podcast Host
We have a question from an online participant. Her name is Sophie Toth. Hi, I'm Sophie, a PhD student, politics and IR, looking at the Biopolitics of Biodiversity at North Eastern University, London. Question for Mike. Has he been informed by Michel Foucault on power and knowledge at all? There seem to be strong Foucaultian overtones in his presentation, and I would be keen to hear more about influences beyond Hayek.
- [76:43]
Professor Mike Hulme
Yeah, I mean, I can't say with Foucaultian. I've read any decent human journal has to read something of Foucault, but I'm not a dyed in the wolf Foucaultian. But from what I understand, he offers a very helpful way of thinking about the relationship between knowledge and power. Hayek. I think of the other part of the question. I mean, Hayek, really. I mean, Mark's here. I mean, Mark got me thinking about this several years ago and Brian's followed up. I would never have read Hayek. I don't think otherwise. And actually reading one or two other things for this lecture, I was really quite surprised to see how much crossover there is at least at a superficial level, between how he was thinking about knowledge in relation to economic planning in the 1940s and how I've been thinking about knowledge in relation to climate governance in the 2000s. So Foucault. Yes. I mean, Foucault is there in. He's in the air, isn't he? Intellectually, he's in the air, but Hayek was more of the learning that I did more recently.
- [77:51]
Event Moderator
Now we are running out of time, so maybe we can take two questions. I'm seeing this person here who's been waiting very patiently and this person as well. And I'll be kind to give you the third question to break my own rule, but let's make them quick, please.
- [78:08]
Podcast Host
So first, thank you for your presentation. I was a bit keen to hear more about the alternatives to the scientists that you are. You spend probably the majority of the talk presenting.
- [78:17]
Professor Mike Hulme
Just hold it a bit closer.
- [78:19]
Podcast Host
Do you really feel like the alternatives you presented in terms of dispersed knowledge practices are equal to the enormity of the challenges like population displacements and mass extinctions to do you feel storytelling and all the other kind of very holistic practices are equal to the challenges that we face? And the other thing is obviously epistemic forum is quite a kind of laudable aim, but often the BBC has been criticized for the both side ism issue of if someone reporting there being a rain outside, you could just look outside and make up your mind if there's a rain or not. And I think possibly climate science is a little bit less socially like, less of a social science compared to economics. Maybe it might not be most appropriate.
- [79:09]
Event Moderator
Okay, we have to be very quick here. I promise two of us.
- [79:14]
Professor Mike Hulme
Thanks for the presentation. Mike, I'd like to paraphrase what you said, which was that science is being oriented towards goals of political action rather than their conditions.
- [79:24]
Professor Liz Robinson
And I'd like to understand why perhaps.
- [79:28]
Professor Mike Hulme
Multiple knowledges wouldn't be privy to the same processes of being oriented towards political goals rather than their conditions.
- [79:39]
Event Moderator
And finally, hi.
- [79:42]
Professor Liz Robinson
Thank you for your presentation. In your talk, you mentioned about or you cautioned about calling the climate change or climate crisis, crisis and emergency. I'm wondering if you have any suggestions on how we can still emphasize the urgency of the action that is needed to be taken without calling it as such.
- [80:00]
Podcast Host
Thank you.
- [80:01]
Event Moderator
Thank you.
- [80:02]
Professor Mike Hulme
Well, okay, very, very briefly, is it equal to the challenges that diverse, multiple forms of knowledge. I think they have to be. We have to make, make them commensurate with the challenges, because the alternative is to stick with very narrow reductionist forms of knowledge. And science has a very powerful ascendancy in that regard. So we have to recognize that there are ways that people make sense of their world around them that are multiple and that should at least get a. I mean, nature talks about science having a seat at the top table. Other forms of knowledge also need a seat at the top table if we're going to do justice to the reality of the world we live in. And the point about the BBC, I've got an interesting little story, but I can't tell it. It's too long about that one and goals and conditions. Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. But I think if one diversifies knowledge and mobilizes knowledge in multiple ways, then I think it gets closer to understanding the conditions at different scales, different geographical scales at which political action is more likely to gain traction. If knowledge matters for policy making, if knowledge is matter for policymaking, we need to have multiple forms of knowledge that are more commensurate with the places and the cultures and the scales of the challenges that people experience. And that suggests moving away from a single knowledge paradigm. And urgency. I don't think this answers your question because I want to interrogate again the whole frame of urgency. What is it we're urgent for? Why is it stopping climate change at 1.5 that is urgent? Or is it, is it hitting the SDG one about poverty? What actually is urgent? But what I would say is that there's an interesting linguistic move that I quite like, I think from an American political scientist, Jason Malloy, and he suggested we should be thinking about climate change as a political epic. Mobilizing the idea of an epic in Greek mythology, which is a long run challenge that is presented to an individual, to a Greek God, which suggests that actually there's no ultimate solution to this. But it's something that we are committed to the quest. But it operates on epic time scales, not on timescales that science tells us after which it's too late. So thinking through political epic might be a more creative and inclusive way. Possibly.
- [83:03]
Event Moderator
And Liz, would you want to add anything just to finally you.
- [83:06]
Professor Liz Robinson
Okay, I don't need to add anything. I think it's 8 o'.
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Professor Mike Hulme
Clock.
- [83:10]
Event Moderator
So let me just say thank you very much everybody for engaged questions and your attention. We've had a wonderful evening. Let us all thank Mike Holman, Liz Robinson.
- [83:21]
Professor Mike Hulme
Now thank you for listening.
- [83:30]
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- [83:33]
Professor Mike Hulme
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- [83:37]
Professor Mike Hulme
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