We must stop saying ‘The science demands ...’

This article was published in Spiked Online 24 May 2010

Top climate-change expert Mike Hulme tells spiked it is a scandal that scientific claims are increasingly usurping politics and morality. ‘To say that the science demands a certain policy response to climate change is just a wrong reading of the relationship between science and policy.’

Mike Hulme, professor of climate change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, is a passionate advocate of science. Yet, as he tells spiked, when it comes to climate change, too many people expect too much of science. Physics and ethics seem to have become conflated in the climate change debate. We see politicians expecting science to determine policy; we see environmental campaigners, armed with peer-reviewed papers, expecting it to win all the arguments; and, in turn, we see so-called sceptics expecting their science to refute the green vision of society. But for Hulme, author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, science cannot, and should not, be expected to do these things. It is no substitute, he argues, for politics or for moral judgements.