Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
This week some 70,000 people are expected in Dubai for the United Nations’ COP28 climate summit. We must surely be glad that world leaders are gathering to try to work out how to reduce the threat of human-induced global warming. We may argue over the figures, but all bar the most diehard sceptics agree that humanity’s activities are warming our planet, and that significant harms could result. We are right to be facing our responsibilities, since God has made us rulers of our world (Genesis 1:26-28).
And yet our conversations on climate change need – if you’ll pardon the expression – cool heads. In the summer, I read a new book with the provocative title Climate Change Isn’t Everything, by Professor Mike Hulme. He argues that a right concern about global warming has morphed into a quasi-religious worldview he calls “climatism”, in which climate change is used to explain a vast array of modern harms, and in which any who cast doubt on this are to be silenced.
Professor Hulme is no climate-change denier: he asserts several times in the book that this is a threat we must take seriously. And he is exceptionally qualified to comment. He is head of the Geography Department at Cambridge University, and climate change has been his lifelong professional field. He contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
The one-size-fits-all approach of climatism, Hulme argues, neglects other problems, such as inequality or poor government, and so can lead to poor policy outcomes. It too easily lets us evade responsibility for policy failures. He gives many examples, such as the vast Pakistan floods of 2022, which weren’t simply because of the changing climate, but changing land use, infrastructure and more.
Such dogmatism can also lead to an unwillingness to examine data objectively: only that which supports this new world view is to be admitted, and good science is made harder. Doomsday predictions (“It’s too late”, etc.) discourage responsible policy setting, including the the design of mitigations. Slogans such as “net zero”, “climate emergency” or “cliff edges” need thinking through rather than simply being assumed. Hulme suggests that the significant rise in anxiety amongst a younger generation may partly be attributable to growing up in a world where these are the prevailing narrative.
Hulme doesn’t mention it, but of course the Bible’s analysis of our world goes deeper. The Bible traces our environmental difficulties ultimately to our rejection of our Creator, as in the verse at the head of this post. This is not for a moment to deny the multitude of immediate causes of environmental stress which we must take seriously, but it is to say we must take seriously the very root of the problem. We thank God for the Saviour of the World, Who came to deal with this, the deepest issue of all.
