Mike Hulme: Climate change is a great mobiliser, not a disaster

From a talk to the Edinburgh Book Festival by the director of the University of East Anglia's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

Climate change has become one of the environmental icons of our time, used by some people almost as a surrogate for everything nasty that nature might throw at us. Thus global warming is variously associated with all the dimensions of adverse environmental management our fragile human psyche is most worried about.

So should we be talking the language of catastrophe or the language of management? Catastrophic portraits of the future suit some temperaments, but do not encourage sober debate. If climate change is framed in terms of risk assessment and management, then it is natural that there will be a wide range of perspectives on how large a risk is posed by climate change and how exactly that risk should be managed.

All societies contain a mixture of risk-takers and the more risk-averse. The instrument of democratic politics is designed to arbitrate in society on a whole range of issues between such different groups of people.

The significance of climate change is that it forces us to think about the long-term consequences of our decisions, more than we are used to. It also forces us to think about issues of global equity and justice, perhaps more powerfully than, say, the parallel moral issue of the indebtedness of developing countries.

Climate change and its management is a moral issue. It requires deployment of ethical arguments to agree on the principles of burden-sharing between nations and individuals about who should first act to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and to judge the level of climate risk we should bequeath to unborn generations.

Climate change should not be seen as the greatest environmental threat to the planet; it should be seen as a powerful mobilising phenomenon that forces humanity to think co-operatively about the sustainability of its long-term future on this planet.