What Climate Change Can Do For the Left

A review of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, by Mike Hulme (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

More than a few people will be tempted to buy this book based on the promise, implicit in its title, that it offers an examination of the ideas and motives of both sides in the global warming debate. But that is not what this book is about.

Rather, it is the musings of a British socialist about how to use the global warming issue as a means of persuading "the masses" to give up their economic liberties. The fact that the author, Mike Hulme, is a scientist who helped write the influential reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many other influential government agencies makes this book more disturbing than informative... [snip]

In his preface, Hulme frankly admits that his perspective is colored by his politics - "democratic socialist"(p. xxxiv) - and it soon becomes apparent that the only disagreements about climate change he's aware of are those occurring between the left (people who think like him) and the far left, people he describes as "eco-anarchists" (p. 268), "eco-socialists" (Ibid.), and "eco-authoritarians" (p. 309).

Opposition from centrists, conservatives, libertarians, and nonideological opposition from scientists who dispute his alarmist spin on the complicated data of global warming merit hardly any mention... [snip]

There is a debate taking place about global warming in America, and it is not the one described by Hulme as being between those who favor "cap and trade" and those who favor even more radical changes in "political, social, and economic behaviour" (p. xxvii).

Rather, it is about how much of the warming of the late twentieth century was natural and how much was man-made, whether the consequences of that warming were on balance positive or negative, and whether anything should be or could be done to prevent or delay future warming, or if in fact such warming has already abated and we're entering another cooling cycle.

This debate - the real public policy debate - is entirely missing from this book...

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