Climate Change isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism

From Judith Curry,

IMO, Mike Hulme is one of the most important thinkers on climate change, and I referenced many of his papers in my book Climate Uncertainty and Risk.  From the book description:

The changing climate poses serious dangers to human and non-human life alike, though perhaps the most urgent danger is one we hear very little about: the rise of climatism. Too many social, political and ecological problems facing the world today – from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the management of wildfires – quickly become climatized, explained with reference to ‘a change in the climate’. When complex political and ethical challenges are so narrowly framed, arresting climate change is sold as the supreme political challenge of our time and everything else becomes subservient to this one goal.

In this far-sighted analysis, Mike Hulme reveals how climatism has taken hold in recent years, becoming so pervasive and embedded in public life that it is increasingly hard to resist it without being written off as a climate denier. He confronts this dangerously myopic view that reduces the condition of the world to the fate of global temperature or the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to the detriment of tackling serious issues as varied as poverty, liberty, biodiversity loss, inequality and international diplomacy. We must not live as though climate alone determines our present and our future.

See this very interesting review from the New Atlantis.

Not Zero:  How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China and Won’t Save the Planet, by Ross Clark

From the book description:

‘Bravely challenging the Establishment consensus … forensically argued’ – Mail on Sunday

The British government has embarked on an ambitious and legally-binding climate change target: reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions to Net Zero by 2050. The Net Zero policy was subject to almost no parliamentary or public scrutiny, and is universally approved by our political class. But what will its consequences be?

Ross Clark argues that it is a terrible mistake, an impractical hostage to fortune which will have massive downsides. Achieving the target is predicated on the rapid development of technologies that are either non-existent, highly speculative or untested. Clark shows that efforts to achieve the target will inevitably result in a huge hit to living standards, which will clobber the poorest hardest, and gift a massive geopolitical advantage to hostile superpowers such as China and Russia. The unrealistic and rigid timetable it imposes could also result in our committing to technologies which turn out to be ineffective, all while distracting ourselves from the far more important objective of adaptation.

This hard-hitting polemic provides a timely critique of a potentially devastating political consensus which could hobble Britain’s economy, cost billions and not even be effective.

Book Review: Polar Bear Evolution: A Model for How New Species Arise

Susan Crockford

The Grip of Culture: The Social Psychology of Climate Change Catastrophism

Some recent reviews:

A cultural analysis, of the kind set out in The Grip of Culture, can explain the suicidal course taken by Western societies. Its message, that the true threat to our civilisation comes, not from the weather or the climate, but from the culture of catastrophism that has weaponised those issues is profoundly disturbing. Those of us who are fond of living in a free and rational society need to understand what we are facing, and soon.- Andrew Montford, Daily Sceptic

Culture explains the power and prevalence of the [climate catastrophe] narrative, the political and societal responses to it and the apparent willingness of many people to incur immense cost to avert a supposed existential threat, without proof of either its existence or our ability to alter its impact. In a new book The Grip of Culture: the Social Psychology of Climate Change Catastrophism, Andy A. West provides an academic analysis of the phenomenon. Its lessons have particular relevance to Canada’s climate obsession.- Joe Oliver, Financial Post

A free pdf of the book is available.

Climate Uncertainty and Risk – Rethinking Our Response

Judith Curry

Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science

Alan Longhurst

Alan Longhurst’s “Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science”

The Unpopular Truth about Electricity and the Future of Energy

Lar Schernikau, William Hayden Smith

Winter Games

Daniel Church

Poorly Zeroed: A Net Zero Travesty

John M. Cape

Poorly Zeroed: A Net Zero Travesty