Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia and founding director to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has been in the news again recently. His new book Why we Disagree about Climate Change has led to sceptics – who I suspect have not read it – welcoming him to their fold. Even the Daily Mirror, which is not a publication that one might choose to rely on for scientific information, has reviewed the book. So has this eminent scientist who has been at the heart of the climate debate for decades really changed sides?
It is certainly true that he wrote an opinion piece for the BBC News website in 2006 warning his colleagues not to exaggerate their findings in order to attract attention. He even went further and condemned the conference – and associated media campaign – which Tony Blair used as a launch-pad for his newly discovered commitment to the crusade against global warming:
The Exeter conference of February 2005 on “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” served the government’s purposes of softening-up the G8 Gleneagles summit through a frenzied week of “climate change is worse than we thought” news reporting and group-think.
By stage-managing the new language of catastrophe, the conference itself became a tipping point in the way that climate change is discussed in public.
In the same article he said that:
The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. It will not be visible in next year’s global assessment from the world authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
This seems to have been a triumph of hope over experience. No one who has consulted the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report could be left in any doubt about the intention of the authors to create alarm, and this was reinforced by the press campaign that accompanied its release. Since then, Hulme has been prepared to criticise the IPCC process too.
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