The Chaotic World of Climate Truth

Is climate change excessively dramatised?

On the BBC News website, Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, warns that presenting climate change as ‘catastrophic’, ‘chaotic’, and ‘irreversible’, could cause more harm than good.

The debate between climate change scientists and climate sceptics has shifted towards a debate between climate change scientists and climate alarmists. The latter speak about the ‘irreversible tipping in the Earth’s climate’. But according to Hulme, ‘the IPCC scenarios of future climate change — between 1.4 and 5.8 °C by 2100 — are significant enough without invoking catastrophe and chaos as unguided weapons’.

He sees two major dangers of such catastrophe discourse. Firstly, ‘the language of fear and terror is an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication’. Just as with most drugs, people tend to need more and more to achieve the same effect or impact. Secondly, actions should be taken based on objective, scientific data; otherwise the cure may be worse than the disease.