You lost me when blaming China for the failure off the Copenhagen Climate Fest to reach a global deal for needlessly bleeding the world economy in solving a non problem. Expectedly, one who has spent years working with the climate unit at East Angie University would have difficulty accepting the obvious. The release of the Climategate Files showing both inept and deceit in the community of manipulators pushing CGAW was and continues to be the factor behind a return to sanity.
An interesting piece; but one that uses a lot of words to say in effect that it's all been bullshit from the start. In the long view, during this current inter-glacial, the earth's climate has probably cooled, since the Holocene Optimum, with countervailing ups and downs along the way, We're in one such 'up' at present (having just emerged from the multi-century Little Ice Age).
There will probably be a climate emergency/catastrophe sometime in the future but it will be a plunge in temperature as the earth departs this inter-glacial and heads into the next glacial. A few thousand years to go? Hopefully a significantly more technologically advanced Homo Sapiens will be equipped to cope with that.
Much as your other various commentaries, your narrative here glosses over the fossil-fuel funded anti-science campaign of the 2000s and its incorporation into US government policies and actions. That mainstreaming of anti-science rhetoric and policy within the Republican party has continued to this day.
You can see the damaging result to climate-related discourse in many of the comments here.
A very interesting telling of your journey, but I am amazed that you never attempted to challenge the received wisdom that rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere caused temperatures to increase. For example, temperatures increased after the LIA, when CO2 levels were never higher than 280 ppm, and did not reach that level until 1950.
Clearly, something other than rising CO2 levels caused the warming.
Science advances by determining the cause of empirical observations, and it turns out that the cause of the recovery from the LIA was simply decreased levels of volcanic SO2 aerosol pollution in the atmosphere.
A telling example of the role of atmospheric SO2 aerosol pollution occurred between 1850 and 2010, when there were 34 American business recessions Each resulted in fewer SO2 aerosol emissions due to idled foundries, factories, etc., and in every instance, temperatures temporarily increased because of the less-polluted air.
Another example is that whenever there are more than about 3 years between VE!4 or higher volcanic eruptions, temperatures also rise, again, because there is less SO2 aerosol pollution of the atmosphere.
Which brings me to my article "Scientific proof that CO2 does NOT cause global warming".
"Getting out of carbon will be far more difficult than getting out of capitalism.” This is the only significant statement in what is otherwise a very good article wit which I disagree. Human well-being in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs was always going to be impossible to ignore, which means that capitalism - the only successful economic system the world has seen in our 12,000 odd years of civilisation - will always reign supreme over ;getting out of carbon'.
For those interested in the early days of the IPCC and UNFCCC. Read Bernie Lewin's book Searching For the Catastrophe Signal, The Origins of the IPCC., GWPF, 2017.
Ironically, Hulme expresses a chastened, realistic perspective without ever mentioning the two most obvious facts about the topic. First, science cannot solve a problem with lies. It’s always unsustainable. He and his colleagues became captive to the modern, (usually leftist), belief that “the end justifies the means”, and so lying in support of, “the cause”, became standard practice. Second, human thriving on planet earth has always been about using more energy, not less. That photovoltaic solar and wind could not and would not ever deliver more energy was knowable in 1985, but instead of acknowledging that the climate science community decided to try to bully the human population into believing a Malthusian fairy tale in which we take 75% of the humans off of the planet and service the surviving population with wind and solar. Just an abjectly stupid reaction to this problem.
In his article, Mike Hulme gives the impression that he regrets having had to bow to human realities, with their contradictions and controversies.
He is honest enough to admit it. But why regret?
Indeed, our societies have no other choice. Between inescapable adaptation and mitigation, politically committed scientists (and thus making not only a mistake but a fault) are posing as heroes of the sole and urgent need for mitigation, whatever the cost. They see adaptation as a poor second-best option, which is a nonsense, since mitigation may only bear fruit around the turn of the century.
Human societies are not in themselves rational entities, and it would be hubris to assume as much. They have never ceased to adapt to adverse conditions and to live as best they can with full knowledge of the facts., the only certainty being our death. That's also why people live well on the slopes of volcanoes - they're neither fools nor reckless.
It was either John Maynard Keynes or Paul Samuelson who first said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" In Hulme's case it seems that the gap between the empirical data and the catastrophist press releases finally became too great to ignore.
Just to add one current "realist" fact, "China consumes 30% more coal than the rest of the world combined, the IEA reported in December." (source, WSJ Jan 7, 2025, article on coal mining in Indonesia)
And their carbon emissions are approaching 3x those of the U.S. why doesn’t Greta Thunberg and other climate activists ever protest in front of the Chinese Embassy?
Interesting article. I would add one more key point.
The world always has thousands of problems, and experts in those fields always believe that solving their problems should be favored above solving all other problems.
All solutions involve trade-offs. One cannot expect the entire world to be reoriented around solving one problem, no matter how important that problem may be to experts in the field. Focusing all our resources on one problem ultimately undermines our ability to solve all other problems.
The entire climate movement was always doomed to fail to achieve its objectives.
I also wrote an article on the topic that adds more context:
Sorry, but the man was always delusional and appears still to be.
He writes, "In other words, it responded by offering new science, more science, more scary science. "
Except the climate movement NEVER offered science. The "solutions" proposed to reduce CO2 were always a delusional pipe dream authored by the college drop-out Lovins and popularized by wealthy malthusians through the use of their TOOL "Foreign Affairs".
If the climate industry/movement/"scientists" had ever based their movement on science, then the proposal would always have been a vast build out of nuclear electricity generation, movement of ocean freight to nuclear freighters, change in subsidies and tax structure to move intercity freight from road to rail, and effort to develop synthetic hydrocarbons powered by nuclear generation, so that the world's transportation infrastructure would not require an impossible replacement.
Science means testing hypotheses and determining how things work in the real world. Lovin's vision has never worked in the real world. Nuclear build out has worked in many regions and many forms in the real world.
Now, I freely admit that the author never specifically mentions Lovin's ideas; instead he glosses over the details by just sticking to generalities like Climate "Science" or the climate movement. But again, in the real world, the climate people have been about nothing but Lovin's delusions since their inception.
The climate change people have always stuck to Lovin's delusions. And here again, he does not denounce the completely unrealistic solutions that have always been the climate movement, he just says they got the politics a little wrong.
This is the most baffling point. How has pretty much the entire political and media class bought into the notion that wind and solar (with some unspecified amount of battery storage), plus biomass, hydro and legacy nuclear power, could displace nearly all of our current fossil fuel usage in a short timeframe? Folks like Mark Z Jacobson, a professor of engineering, are still feeding this narrative as there are plenty of organizations that will amplify his astounding conclusions. Where have all the engineers gone?
“I uncritically absorbed the notion that climate change represented the pre-eminent challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century.”
This is the problem with many people, not treating the costs arising from the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere as just another economic problem, how to find the incentives that will lead to the greatest NPV considering the costs of mitigation and adaption together with the benefits of reduced harm from the accumulation.
It is not surprising – or blameworthy -- that someone whose profession it is to estimate the links of CO2 accumulation and geophysical changes did not recognize until later the economic optimization nature of this challenge.
“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” [See
What does this mean? All nations should tax the emission of net CO2. The tax has some (not a large, but some) deadweight loss in people making somewhat different consumption and production decisions. Fossil fuel importing countries will bear more of the cost as prices of fossil fuels will fall as demand falls. For man fossil fuel importing countries, this may well outweigh the DWL of the tax on net emissions.
Unfortunately, international discussions of policies to address the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere have never focused on that simplest, lowest cost option, the tax on net emissions, instead focusing on arbitrary emission reduction goals without regard for how much emissions would fall, if any, in a given if it were following the least cost reduction principle. [The relation of this to the potted history of the end of the Cold War is totally mysterious.] See: https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/cop-29-still-off-target
“Carbon budgets replaced emissions scenarios and the idea of ‘net-zero’ emissions was born[12]; theoretical world decarbonization pathways to achieve net-zero were modelled to keep alive the illusion that a rapid global energy transition was possible[13]; weather attribution science was created as a new tool to drive home the imminence of climate change to a sceptical public; and the language of ‘loss and damage’ emerged to appease the concerns of the developing world. ”
Net zero by some date makes sense. If CO2 accumulation is harmful the objection mut be to prevent further accumulation at some point. How much of that is accomplished by gross reduction and how much by CCS remains to be seen. Likewise, the related goal of global temperature rise of no more than x by year z depends on which policies or employed to incentivize lower net emissions. The date for achieving net zero or the trajectory of the maximum departure of the GMT from the baseline is also an optimization problem. “Attribution science” (IFF dome properly) is just using the same models that point to the least cost ways of reducing future harm from CO2 emissions to identify in the present, the harm from past emissions.
“But Pielke’s iron law of climate policy—'when environmental and economic objectives are placed into opposition with one another in public or political forums, the economic goals win out’—could not be broken”
This is pointless confrontation. Environmental objectives are part of economic objectives. The whole objective of reducing CO2 accumulation, using the least cost means, of course, is to maximize the net present value of monetary and non-monetary benefits.
“Climate change is locked into state-sponsored oil extraction, Indian coal, Africa’s demography, China’s unwavering self-interest packaged in warm climate-sounding words, and the legitimate aspirations of half of the world’s population for the benefits of high-energy modernism.”
“Locked into”, but not in contradiction to the benefits of high-energy modernism.
“The best that we can say is that the world will continue slowly to decarbonize its energy system and, at the same time, the Earth will continue slowly to warm. And societies will continue to adapt to evolving climate hazards in new ways, as they have always done, with winners and losers along the way.”
Exactly! And the role of people of goodwill should be to advocate for policies that will speed the (net) decarbonization of global energy and other systems so as to slow and eventually stop (and possible reverse) the warming of the Earth even as societies adapt to the effects of CO2 accumulation at as low cost as possible.
I truly appreciate the humility of the author in this article. I'd offer a few thoughts. The IPCC and their ilk have lost credibility with a large swath of the public, much as the main-stream media has. For much of the public, they look at rapidly declining weather-related deaths and rapid decreases in global poverty. Humanity has never had it so good by any objective measure. They juxtapose this widely experienced reality with rapidly increasing electricity prices coupled with decreasing grid reliability wherever renewables are subsidized and mandated in large scale, then logically ask themselves, "now remind me again what the benefits of this energy transition are?" Sea level rise largely consistent with the past 150 years and barely perceptible within a human's life span, along with imperceptible increases in temperatures that are well within tolerable ranges, and largely beneficial for most of earth's life, will not convince critically thinking people that a dramatic amount of human suffering to combat climate change is a hill on which to die.
You lost me when blaming China for the failure off the Copenhagen Climate Fest to reach a global deal for needlessly bleeding the world economy in solving a non problem. Expectedly, one who has spent years working with the climate unit at East Angie University would have difficulty accepting the obvious. The release of the Climategate Files showing both inept and deceit in the community of manipulators pushing CGAW was and continues to be the factor behind a return to sanity.
An interesting piece; but one that uses a lot of words to say in effect that it's all been bullshit from the start. In the long view, during this current inter-glacial, the earth's climate has probably cooled, since the Holocene Optimum, with countervailing ups and downs along the way, We're in one such 'up' at present (having just emerged from the multi-century Little Ice Age).
There will probably be a climate emergency/catastrophe sometime in the future but it will be a plunge in temperature as the earth departs this inter-glacial and heads into the next glacial. A few thousand years to go? Hopefully a significantly more technologically advanced Homo Sapiens will be equipped to cope with that.
Much as your other various commentaries, your narrative here glosses over the fossil-fuel funded anti-science campaign of the 2000s and its incorporation into US government policies and actions. That mainstreaming of anti-science rhetoric and policy within the Republican party has continued to this day.
You can see the damaging result to climate-related discourse in many of the comments here.
I rather think the apocalyptic fear-mongering discourse of the paid-for climate alarmists was the 'anti-science' stuff.
As Upton Sinclair said in the early 20th C: "It is hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it"
(For 'salary' read 'funding grant')
Dr. Hulme:
A very interesting telling of your journey, but I am amazed that you never attempted to challenge the received wisdom that rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere caused temperatures to increase. For example, temperatures increased after the LIA, when CO2 levels were never higher than 280 ppm, and did not reach that level until 1950.
Clearly, something other than rising CO2 levels caused the warming.
Science advances by determining the cause of empirical observations, and it turns out that the cause of the recovery from the LIA was simply decreased levels of volcanic SO2 aerosol pollution in the atmosphere.
A telling example of the role of atmospheric SO2 aerosol pollution occurred between 1850 and 2010, when there were 34 American business recessions Each resulted in fewer SO2 aerosol emissions due to idled foundries, factories, etc., and in every instance, temperatures temporarily increased because of the less-polluted air.
Another example is that whenever there are more than about 3 years between VE!4 or higher volcanic eruptions, temperatures also rise, again, because there is less SO2 aerosol pollution of the atmosphere.
Which brings me to my article "Scientific proof that CO2 does NOT cause global warming".
https://wjarr.com/sites.default/files/WJARR-2024-0884.pdf
This article is irrefutable, and it provides direction towards what needs to be done towards controlling our cooling or warming climate.
I learned the fallacy of an existential climate crisis from reading Michael Shellenberger's seminal book Apocalypse Never.
"Getting out of carbon will be far more difficult than getting out of capitalism.” This is the only significant statement in what is otherwise a very good article wit which I disagree. Human well-being in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs was always going to be impossible to ignore, which means that capitalism - the only successful economic system the world has seen in our 12,000 odd years of civilisation - will always reign supreme over ;getting out of carbon'.
For those interested in the early days of the IPCC and UNFCCC. Read Bernie Lewin's book Searching For the Catastrophe Signal, The Origins of the IPCC., GWPF, 2017.
Robert W. Street
Thanks for that. I will check it out.
Ironically, Hulme expresses a chastened, realistic perspective without ever mentioning the two most obvious facts about the topic. First, science cannot solve a problem with lies. It’s always unsustainable. He and his colleagues became captive to the modern, (usually leftist), belief that “the end justifies the means”, and so lying in support of, “the cause”, became standard practice. Second, human thriving on planet earth has always been about using more energy, not less. That photovoltaic solar and wind could not and would not ever deliver more energy was knowable in 1985, but instead of acknowledging that the climate science community decided to try to bully the human population into believing a Malthusian fairy tale in which we take 75% of the humans off of the planet and service the surviving population with wind and solar. Just an abjectly stupid reaction to this problem.
In his article, Mike Hulme gives the impression that he regrets having had to bow to human realities, with their contradictions and controversies.
He is honest enough to admit it. But why regret?
Indeed, our societies have no other choice. Between inescapable adaptation and mitigation, politically committed scientists (and thus making not only a mistake but a fault) are posing as heroes of the sole and urgent need for mitigation, whatever the cost. They see adaptation as a poor second-best option, which is a nonsense, since mitigation may only bear fruit around the turn of the century.
Human societies are not in themselves rational entities, and it would be hubris to assume as much. They have never ceased to adapt to adverse conditions and to live as best they can with full knowledge of the facts., the only certainty being our death. That's also why people live well on the slopes of volcanoes - they're neither fools nor reckless.
It was either John Maynard Keynes or Paul Samuelson who first said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" In Hulme's case it seems that the gap between the empirical data and the catastrophist press releases finally became too great to ignore.
Keynes, I think.
Thanks for the historical summary.
Just to add one current "realist" fact, "China consumes 30% more coal than the rest of the world combined, the IEA reported in December." (source, WSJ Jan 7, 2025, article on coal mining in Indonesia)
And their carbon emissions are approaching 3x those of the U.S. why doesn’t Greta Thunberg and other climate activists ever protest in front of the Chinese Embassy?
There’s no money in that
Interesting article. I would add one more key point.
The world always has thousands of problems, and experts in those fields always believe that solving their problems should be favored above solving all other problems.
All solutions involve trade-offs. One cannot expect the entire world to be reoriented around solving one problem, no matter how important that problem may be to experts in the field. Focusing all our resources on one problem ultimately undermines our ability to solve all other problems.
The entire climate movement was always doomed to fail to achieve its objectives.
I also wrote an article on the topic that adds more context:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/how-green-energy-policies-ate-the
Sorry, but the man was always delusional and appears still to be.
He writes, "In other words, it responded by offering new science, more science, more scary science. "
Except the climate movement NEVER offered science. The "solutions" proposed to reduce CO2 were always a delusional pipe dream authored by the college drop-out Lovins and popularized by wealthy malthusians through the use of their TOOL "Foreign Affairs".
If the climate industry/movement/"scientists" had ever based their movement on science, then the proposal would always have been a vast build out of nuclear electricity generation, movement of ocean freight to nuclear freighters, change in subsidies and tax structure to move intercity freight from road to rail, and effort to develop synthetic hydrocarbons powered by nuclear generation, so that the world's transportation infrastructure would not require an impossible replacement.
Science means testing hypotheses and determining how things work in the real world. Lovin's vision has never worked in the real world. Nuclear build out has worked in many regions and many forms in the real world.
Now, I freely admit that the author never specifically mentions Lovin's ideas; instead he glosses over the details by just sticking to generalities like Climate "Science" or the climate movement. But again, in the real world, the climate people have been about nothing but Lovin's delusions since their inception.
The climate change people have always stuck to Lovin's delusions. And here again, he does not denounce the completely unrealistic solutions that have always been the climate movement, he just says they got the politics a little wrong.
Delusional.
This is the most baffling point. How has pretty much the entire political and media class bought into the notion that wind and solar (with some unspecified amount of battery storage), plus biomass, hydro and legacy nuclear power, could displace nearly all of our current fossil fuel usage in a short timeframe? Folks like Mark Z Jacobson, a professor of engineering, are still feeding this narrative as there are plenty of organizations that will amplify his astounding conclusions. Where have all the engineers gone?
Great questions. I don't have any clear answers, unless I embrace widespread corruption as a hypothesis.
In 1978 I was told by my 9th grade Earth Sciences teacher that Manhattan would be six feet underwater by the year 2000, still waiting.
This is puzzling piece.
“I uncritically absorbed the notion that climate change represented the pre-eminent challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century.”
This is the problem with many people, not treating the costs arising from the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere as just another economic problem, how to find the incentives that will lead to the greatest NPV considering the costs of mitigation and adaption together with the benefits of reduced harm from the accumulation.
It is not surprising – or blameworthy -- that someone whose profession it is to estimate the links of CO2 accumulation and geophysical changes did not recognize until later the economic optimization nature of this challenge.
“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” [See
What does this mean? All nations should tax the emission of net CO2. The tax has some (not a large, but some) deadweight loss in people making somewhat different consumption and production decisions. Fossil fuel importing countries will bear more of the cost as prices of fossil fuels will fall as demand falls. For man fossil fuel importing countries, this may well outweigh the DWL of the tax on net emissions.
Unfortunately, international discussions of policies to address the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere have never focused on that simplest, lowest cost option, the tax on net emissions, instead focusing on arbitrary emission reduction goals without regard for how much emissions would fall, if any, in a given if it were following the least cost reduction principle. [The relation of this to the potted history of the end of the Cold War is totally mysterious.] See: https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/cop-29-still-off-target
“Carbon budgets replaced emissions scenarios and the idea of ‘net-zero’ emissions was born[12]; theoretical world decarbonization pathways to achieve net-zero were modelled to keep alive the illusion that a rapid global energy transition was possible[13]; weather attribution science was created as a new tool to drive home the imminence of climate change to a sceptical public; and the language of ‘loss and damage’ emerged to appease the concerns of the developing world. ”
Net zero by some date makes sense. If CO2 accumulation is harmful the objection mut be to prevent further accumulation at some point. How much of that is accomplished by gross reduction and how much by CCS remains to be seen. Likewise, the related goal of global temperature rise of no more than x by year z depends on which policies or employed to incentivize lower net emissions. The date for achieving net zero or the trajectory of the maximum departure of the GMT from the baseline is also an optimization problem. “Attribution science” (IFF dome properly) is just using the same models that point to the least cost ways of reducing future harm from CO2 emissions to identify in the present, the harm from past emissions.
“But Pielke’s iron law of climate policy—'when environmental and economic objectives are placed into opposition with one another in public or political forums, the economic goals win out’—could not be broken”
This is pointless confrontation. Environmental objectives are part of economic objectives. The whole objective of reducing CO2 accumulation, using the least cost means, of course, is to maximize the net present value of monetary and non-monetary benefits.
“Climate change is locked into state-sponsored oil extraction, Indian coal, Africa’s demography, China’s unwavering self-interest packaged in warm climate-sounding words, and the legitimate aspirations of half of the world’s population for the benefits of high-energy modernism.”
“Locked into”, but not in contradiction to the benefits of high-energy modernism.
“The best that we can say is that the world will continue slowly to decarbonize its energy system and, at the same time, the Earth will continue slowly to warm. And societies will continue to adapt to evolving climate hazards in new ways, as they have always done, with winners and losers along the way.”
Exactly! And the role of people of goodwill should be to advocate for policies that will speed the (net) decarbonization of global energy and other systems so as to slow and eventually stop (and possible reverse) the warming of the Earth even as societies adapt to the effects of CO2 accumulation at as low cost as possible.
I truly appreciate the humility of the author in this article. I'd offer a few thoughts. The IPCC and their ilk have lost credibility with a large swath of the public, much as the main-stream media has. For much of the public, they look at rapidly declining weather-related deaths and rapid decreases in global poverty. Humanity has never had it so good by any objective measure. They juxtapose this widely experienced reality with rapidly increasing electricity prices coupled with decreasing grid reliability wherever renewables are subsidized and mandated in large scale, then logically ask themselves, "now remind me again what the benefits of this energy transition are?" Sea level rise largely consistent with the past 150 years and barely perceptible within a human's life span, along with imperceptible increases in temperatures that are well within tolerable ranges, and largely beneficial for most of earth's life, will not convince critically thinking people that a dramatic amount of human suffering to combat climate change is a hill on which to die.