Opinion column in The Times newspaper, published 25 July 2023, reproduced below. Based on my new book ‘Climate Change Isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics From Alarmism‘ (Polity, 2023).
“Towering above New York’s Union Square, a giant clock 80ft wide counts down “the critical time window remaining for humanity to act to save itself and its only home from the ravages of climate chaos”. As I write, just 5 years, 363 days, 8 hours, 56 minutes and 56 seconds remain before “climate chaos” ensues.
This ticking clock, and others like it, feeds the climate doomism that seems to have gripped many people’s imaginations in recent years, especially those of teenagers and young adults. Such doomism creates an atmosphere of deadlines and scarcity. It fuels what I call the ideology of climatism, an unyielding belief that stopping climate change is the pre-eminent yardstick against which all policies must be measured.
“Climate-related hazards — hurricanes, heatwaves, floods, droughts — offer dramatic and powerful visual narratives that are easily linked with a changing climate. We have seen this in recent days with wildfires in the Greek islands. Such extreme manifestations of disasters lend themselves to instant and intuitive judgments about climate change. They become the massively circulating visual memes underpinning climatism.
“Such visual rhetoric feeds some of the more egregious examples of doom-mongering. Take this example from the veteran environment campaigner Mayer Hillman in an interview in The Guardian in 2018: “We’re doomed,” he said. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.”
“The recurring trope of “time is short” feeds a discourse of scarcity in the public politics of climate change. Future climate is understood only in terms of a threshold, a “point of no return”, after which political action becomes “too late”. Headlines such as “Climate scientists to world: We have only 20 years before there’s no turning back” and “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months” are commonplace.
“Rather than a comet hurtling towards Earth to bring about its total demise — as in Adam McKay’s film Don’t Look Up — this discourse inverts the image: Earth is imagined to be hurtling towards a climatic cliff edge after which it is game over. Time is always short, action is always urgent, the time to act is always now.
“This deadline-ism has worrying political and psychological implications. If time is short, then any action will do, as long as it reduces emissions. Not surprisingly, making time appear scarce leads to short-term thinking. Everything must be conducted in a hurry. It leads to narrow thinking and psychological anxiety. Doing whatever it takes without consideration of wider consequences has dangerous political ramifications. The time-scarcity of deadline-ism also induces emotions of panic, fear and disengagement as the end is imagined to be approaching. The future is closed down to a point of no return that, if crossed, is declared to be the end. For the Union Square climate clock, this “ending” is July 22, 2029.
“In a video post in October 2021, 27-year-old TikTok host Charles McBryde revealed that he was a “climate doomer”. Climate doomers, drawn in by climatism’s dark apocalyptic rhetoric, believe there is little that can be done to slow or to stop climate change. McBryde admitted to “feeling overwhelmed, anxious and depressed about global warming”. But he also called out to his 150,000 followers on TikTok for help to escape his addiction to such feelings: “Convince me that there’s something out there that’s worth fighting for, that in the end we can achieve victory over this, even if it’s only temporary.”
“McBryde is just one of many who who feel the same. A 2021 survey of 10,000 people aged between 16 and 25 across ten countries revealed the depth of anxiety many young people are feeling. Nearly 60 per cent of respondents said they felt “very worried” or “extremely worried” about climate change, and three quarters said they thought the future was frightening. Two thirds reported feeling sad, afraid and anxious. More than half agreed with McBryde in thinking that humanity is doomed.
“Having too many last chances to tackle climate change effectively stifles attempts to enact real change. When deadlines are repeatedly missed the psychological effect is cynicism, despair or apathy. There are only so many “moments of decision” that are believable, after which they become disbelieved, losing whatever galvanising force for political action they may have had.
“There are no decisive cliff edges waiting in the climate system for the human world to fall over. ‘Tipping points” may be useful metaphors to aid our thinking about non-linear changes in physical climate systems. But they are metaphors, not to be taken literally. And deadlines for when certain things “must” be achieved need to be recognised as human constructions. They are not commands spoken to us from the external physical world.
“Rather than imagining cliff edges or crevasses, a better metaphor to think with is the picture of a gradient. Every 0.1C of global warming that occurs increases some of the risks associated with climate change; with every 0.1C avoided some of those risks are reduced.
“Doomsday clocks need replacing with the language of possibility. New technologies can limit the extent of future warming and human ingenuity and innovation can develop new strategies to adapt to future changes. Doomism feeds off messages of endings and failures. Its opposite motivates young people to contribute to a future world that does not end in six years’ time.”
Mike Hulme is professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge and the author of ‘Climate Change Isn’t Everything’ (Polity Press, 2023)
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