Climatism is a social, political, and economic ideology and movement that emerged toward the end of the 20th century and aims to combat global warming, for example through climate change mitigation, so that its impact on people's living conditions is mitigated and ultimately neutralized.[1] More specifically, the idea of net-zero emissions emerged in the 2010s, the notion that an account of emission and capture of greenhouse gases by a certain deadline should show net emissions of zero.[2]
The term originated in the 2000s, initially used pejoratively by climate skeptics and others who did not believe in human-caused global warming and its harmful effects, about those who did.[3] These critics have regularly referred to climatism as a movement with religious traits,[4][5][6] with dogmas, prophet, apocalypse, morality,[7]:89guilt, and hope. Or they have characterized the movement as undemocratic and compared its desire for a world government, which could handle global warming, with the former regimes in communist Eastern Europe.[8]
Definitions
According to Steve Goreham, climatism "is an ideology promoting the belief that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are destroying the Earth's climate". He denies any human influence on climate and does not believe in climate change mitigation.[7]:28[3]
According to Mike Hulme, climatism is the belief that many of the big problems, like wars, wildfires and migrant flows, facing the peoples and governments around the world in the decades around year 2000 are caused by man-made climate change, and should be solved by mitigating this climate change, more specifically by achieving net zero carbon emissions. This ideology has grown out of a climate reductionist way of thinking, where "climate alone will determine the human future".[7]:7–8 As opposed to Goreham, Hulme recognizes human influence on climate change, but believes it should be mitigated in more ways than just achieving net zero emissions.[7]:28
History
After the discovery around 1960 that the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere steadily increases, and the effect this has on global warming, American economist William Nordhaus was in the 1970's the first to analyse the cost of limiting global warming. His analysis linked the economic parameter of GDP to the meteorological parameter of global temperature, thereby introducing global temperature as an overall measure of global climate condition, and thus made global temperature available as a control variable for policy makers, like GDP.[7]:44–45 And like during the 20. century, GDP came to define the health of an economy, then likewise in the first decades of the 21. century, global temperature has come to define the health of world climate, in what has been described as a sort of fetischism, lending more significance to GPD and global temperature, respectively, than what is reasonable.[7]:46–47
It has been suggested that, partly as a consequence of the above-mentioned, the rise of climatism as an ideology has consisted of the following steps:[7]:48–60
The history of climate was reduced only to its physical history.
Climatism has thus evolved from the study of climate and climate change, by "predicting the future of the world on the basis of future climate", thereby reducing the prediction of future conditions, including environmental and cultural phenomena, and the solution of public and political matters of concern into dealing with and mitigating the human causes of climate change.[7]:26–28 This line of thinking has tended to structure the way in which the present and future of planet Earth is being understood, leading to the ideology of climatism, see quote.[7]:40
Debate
The rhetoric of time scarcity should not be used to short-circuit democratic processes.
Complaints against climatism focus on what has been called a 'narrowing of vision', by reducing the understanding of the future to a scientific approach, namely the "fate of global climate and the achievement of Net-Zero", disregarding or marginalizing "the broader context of human development, political freedom, technological innovation, human adaptation and ecological evolution". Further, climatism has been criticized for only offering an understanding of relationships between climate, society and policy as seen from a scientific angle, assuming that scientific knowledge is sufficient for designing solutions, thus ignoring political debate.[7]:123–124
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