This is an excerpt from the transcript of a very interesting episode of Radio national (Australia) All In The Mind with Natasha Mitchell on “Climate Change and the Psyche“.
It features an interview with Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an organisation described by The Register as “so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement”. Hulme left the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in 2007 and has since become an “outspoken critic of such sacred cows as the UN’s IPCC, the “consensus”, the over-emphasis on scientific evidence in political debates about climate change, and to defend the rights of so-called “deniers” to contribute to those debates”.
In his new book “Why We Disagree About Climate Change” , he explores the politics, sociology, anthropology and psychology of climate change, something he does not see as “solvable”, but rather something we need to adapt to rationally.
In this interview he illuminates something I have sensed but not been able to word until now: the myth of Themisius as applied to climate change.
[Themisius is] the Greek goddess of natural law and order or justice and
quite often we approach climate change and we quite quickly move into
the arguments around inequality that the rich and northern nations have
been causing the problem but it’s the poorer southern nations who are
most exposed to the consequences of it. And that quite quickly leads to
a very powerful, a very morally driven language and discourse of
justice and equity. And for some people this myth, the myth of
Themisius is actually really what climate change is about. It’s not
about physically trying to stop climate change per se, but it’s about
using climate change to attend to the injustices and the inequalities
and inequities that trouble our world. And again for me this is very
important to recognise this trope of communication.
Here is the an excerpt from the show:
Natasha Mitchell: Leading climate scientist Mike Hulme is Professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia. He was founding director of the acclaimed Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, but as a major contributor to the scientific consensus on climate change his new book Why We Disagree About Climate Change really takes him into new and provocative terrain. He joins me today to discuss mythology, our mental ecology and a changing climate, as will Dr Jonathan Marshall an anthropologist and research fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney who’s just edited a collection of Jungian perspectives on climate change called Depth, Psychology, Disorder and Climate Change in which climate is cast as a struggle with ourselves as much as our physical world with a call to dig deeper into our psyche and our unconscious for new myths and motivations to respond to it. So, starting with Mike Hulme — Mike, why do you argue climate is as much a phenomenon of the mind and culture?Mike Hulme: Yes, well this is where I start off the story, you see, because too often I think stories or books around climate change start off with oh what the scientists have discovered in the last 30 years. I start the story much further back in cultural history because of this ongoing and enduring relationship that humans have had with the weather around them or what we have called climate, which is simply the ensemble of weather experiences.
And it’s very important to start there because to me this is what distinguishes climate change. Climate change is not like the hole in the ozone layer, the depletion of stratospheric ozone, because we’ve never had a cultural relationship with stratospheric ozone. Most people didn’t even know stratospheric ozone was there. But with climate we’ve had millennia of experience and relationships of storytelling and that’s actually why climate change can’t be placed into this box of a technical problem requiring a technical solution. It actually has to be approached through the lens of culture if we are actually going to really understand what it signifies for us and therefore what sort of responses we have to make to it.
Natasha Mitchell: Are there historical stories of climate that particularly stood out for you in your investigations?
Mike Hulme: Well I did a very brief survey of some of the different ways in which different cultures conceive of climate and of course there are indigenous cultures who see in the performance of weather the behaviour and the personality of the gods. The retribution of the gods for immoral behaviour, or the blessing of the gods through weather for good behaviour. And actually that trope is also present in early modern European societies as well. Climate gets endowed with this religious language, this morality, and that shows again how intimate this relationship is between how we see ourselves and our behaviour and our responsibilities and how we think of the performance of the weather.
…Natasha Mitchell: …Mike you’ve also drawn out four enduring and interesting myths, myths in an anthropological sense, that you think were used to make sense of and to psychologise about the world and that you think are relevant to climate change. Why have you turned to mythology?
Mike Hulme: Well, yes, that’s right. I’ve not come at this from a professional anthropologist or a psychologist but it just seemed to me as an amateur in this area that actually myths — in the anthropological sense that Jonathan has just been describing — can be
very useful vehicles for helping us to understand why we seem to adopt different positions. And this is one of the things that’s been not concerning me but fascinating me as a researcher, to understand the many different ways we end up talking about climate change. It is not as simple as here is the science that’s telling us what the problem is, here are the policies that could attend to the problem, and let’s get the politicians to implement the policies. That’s a very naïve and linear model which is not adequate.But myths help us to understand that things are actually much more complicated than that and the four myths that I picked out from what I hear and listen and read in the way that climate change is talked about, is myths that emerge from our instincts, for nostalgia, for fear, of pride and of justice, and I attach labels to these using biblical and Greek mythology. So it’s the myth of Eden which is this sense of having lost something that is innocent, humans are now changing not just their local environment but humans are actually rewriting the entire planetary nature and that concerns us because we feel that in doing so we have lost something that’s important to us.
Natasha Mitchell: And that really casts I guess nature as something pristine and to be protected?
Mike Hulme: Exactly, that it rather is something that is sacred and shouldn’t be contaminated by human activity. And to me that’s a mythical position but it is a very powerful one, I think, that appeals to quite a lot of the discourse that we hear around climate change.
Natasha Mitchell: Well it’s certainly driven much of many environmental philosophies and activists over the decades.
Mike Hulme: That’s right; it appeals to that instinct and is a lament for something that’s been lost. But the second one is rather different although perversely one can hold the two together, the myth of the Apocalypse, this enduring fear of the future, because the future has always been unknown to humans and always will be unknown to humans. Something that gives us new cause for anxiety and worry it can be a very powerful myth — the Apocalypse — and the language that we do sometimes hear around climate change: eight years before the end of the world, catastrophe or tipping points are around the corner. It’s a very powerful way that people do engage with the idea of climate.
Natasha Mitchell: And it’s become a very powerful rhetorical device, again, hasn’t it?
Mike Hulme: It has and we’ve seen it certainly in the run-up to this big international meeting in Copenhagen in a few weeks time. The rhetorical language of expectation for that meeting plays very often to this Apocalyptic myth, that if we don’t get a deal in Copenhagen then we’ve signed a suicide pact — basically all is lost. But I think for many others it can have the opposite reaction in fact, that it is a trope, a mode of a discourse, that is actually disempowering and fatalising that people think well if it really is this bad there’s nothing I can do about it so I may as well just live, drink and be happy. And some of the social behavioural psychology work that we’ve done in the UK suggests that that actually does seem to be quite often the reaction to overplaying this fear of the impending Apocalypse, it doesn’t really engage in behavioural change.
Natasha Mitchell: Well Mike Hulme, one of the myths that you nominate that is about behavioural change is perhaps the Promethean myth. What are you nominating there?
Mike Hulme: Yes, well this is the Greek deity who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to the mortals but in the process lost his way. But it’s trying to get this idea that humans have this desire for mastery and control and we’ve seen it again emerging in many, many episodes of human history and it’s an enduring instinct and enduring desire. And with climate change it plays in the sense that we want to reassert our control, to re-engineer the climate to bring stability back. It’s a little bit like what Jonathan was saying earlier on about the ordering of the world around us, and if we see that there is some chaos or disorder our instinct is to want to try to put order back and we become the masters. And particularly I feel that this is the instinct that is driving some of the new language of climate engineering, these…
Natasha Mitchell: The big geo-engineering efforts…
Mike Hulme: The big geo-engineering efforts to put mirrors in space and aerosols into the stratosphere to create a thermostat for the planet, so we just have to change the thermostat to get the climate that we want. That to me is the ultimate sort of hubris of humans that we can somehow produce that intricate level of control over the natural world. I just don’t — personally I don’t believe that but I do think it’s an important mythic position and I think it does help to explain some of the arguments and language that we hear around climate change.
Natasha Mitchell: What’s your last myth that you nominate? You do nominate a fourth which I find very interesting.
Mike Hulme: Yes, the fourth one is again a very frequently used mythic position when talking about climate change. It’s the myth of Themisius the Greek goddess of natural law and order or justice and quite often we approach climate change and we quite quickly move into the arguments around inequality that the rich and northern nations have been causing the problem but it’s the poorer southern nations who are most exposed to the consequences of it. And that quite quickly leads to a very powerful, a very morally driven language and discourse of justice and equity. And for some people this myth, the myth of Themisius is actually really what climate change is about. It’s not about physically trying to stop climate change per se, but it’s about using climate change to attend to the injustices and the inequalities and inequities that trouble our world. And again for me this is very important to recognise this trope of communication.
Natasha Mitchell: I mean as a climate scientist it’s interesting then to read you when you say the ultimate significance of climate change is ideological and symbolic rather than physical and substantive. Is this the basis upon which you nominate these four myths?
Mike Hulme: Yes, I think this is a position that I’ve come to. Ten years ago I probably wouldn’t have understood myself what I was taking about. But you know after these last three or four years I’ve read much more widely, I’ve appreciated what anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy can offer here. And to me this actually now is where we have to take climate change, we have to understand its symbolic significance and use climate change to look back on ourselves, on our own behaviour, on our own values and attitudes, and find ways of mobilising not in a way that will get global agreement, because I don’t believe that we can ever fully reconcile all of these different mythic positions. So I’m not proposing in some sense that we can get a global agreement that will somehow bring in climate change to an end. But I think if we’re going to use the idea of climate change in any creative way, we’ve got to turn this back into understanding ourselves, our behaviour and what drives our different types of behaviours.
More: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2009/2746165.htm
Also see:
http://mikehulme.org - Prof. Hulme’s home site
Top British boffin: Time to ditch the climate consensus – The Register
‘Show Your Working’: What ‘ClimateGate’ means – BBC (article by Mike Hulme and Jerome Ravetz)
Climategate: Why it matters – The Register
The four myths behind the climate change debate – Richard Chandler for CBS News
Climate fraud kills people - Ivo Vegter for The Daily Maverick. Check out the follow-up “LETTER: Ivo Vegter hits a climate nerve, ‘should be fired’ (and Vegter responds)”
