From Idealism to Realism - Highlighted Article

From: The Honest Broker - Substack

By: Mike Hulme

Date: January 13, 2025

From Idealism to Realism

This is a guest post by Mike Hulme, Professor of Human geography at Cambridge University. Mike is one of the world’s most accomplished climate scientists. Hulme participated in the IPCC second and third assessments, was part of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, where he subsequently founded the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA. He has been at Cambridge University since 2017. Mike and I are long-time collaborators, and we co-authored The Hartwell Paper (2009). Mike’s publication record is expansive and involves many collaborators around the world. He maintains an active website where you can find his research and commentary. Now over to Mike . . . —Roger Pielke Jr.

Geopolitics, History and Climate Change: A Personal View[1]

Mike Hulme, University of Cambridge

“To think that we can draw some useful analogies from history dramatically underestimates the novelty and scale of the climate challenge.”[2]

“In the contest between geopolitics and sustainable climate policies, the former takes precedence.”[3]

Starting in the early 1980s, I have spent my entire professional life studying climate change, as well as teaching, writing and speaking about it in universities, conferences, and public forums around the world—in 43 countries at the latest count. With such a professional and personal investment in the idea of climate change, it is not surprising that for a long period I uncritically absorbed the notion that climate change represented the pre-eminent challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century.

Since first immersing myself in the topic in the 1980s, and subsequently being part of the scientific and public story of climate change in the 1990s and 2000s[4], I was easily convinced that the growing human influence on the world’s climate would be a reality that all nations would increasingly need to confront, a reality to which their interests would necessarily be subservient and that would be decisive for shaping their development pathways. For more than half of these 40 or so years, it seemed to me self-evident that relations between nations would forcibly be re-shaped by the exigencies of a changing climate.

But now, in the mid-2020s, I can see that I got this the wrong way round. And I can also see why this was so. Rather than geopolitics having to bend to the realities of a changing climate, the opposite has happened. The unyielding force of political realism—the pursuit of the changing and unpredictable interests of nations and great powers—means that the framing, significance, and responses to climate change need continually to adapt to shifting geopolitical realities. Except that too often they haven’t. Whilst the world’s climate has undoubtedly changed over these 40 years, the geopolitics, demography, and culture of the world has changed even more.[5] Too often the language, rhetoric, and campaigning around climate change remains wedded to a world that no longer exists. (continue reading)

From Idealism to Realism