Professor Mike Hulm, Professor of Climate Change, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia.
Abstract:
There are two propositions about knowledge, society and policy-making, which if true, are troubling in the context of climate (global) change. Firstly, policy making seems ever more reliant on knowledge and yet science seems to deliver knowledge with ever less certainty or authority, and second, here I quote Dan Sarewitz (1996) – “if humanity is unable or unwilling to make wise use of existing technical knowledge, is there any reason to believe that new knowledge will succeed where old knowledge has failed?”
In this talk, I will analyse recent calls for enhanced knowledge making around climate change – for example, from the IPCC and the Earth System Science Partnership – by asking and answering three specific questions: What sort of knowledge do we need to understand climate change? How do we frame gaps in knowledge? Why do we think more knowledge matters anyway? I will suggest that the frequently heard ‘calls for action’ emanating from the knowledge community fail to engage with normative problems in political philosophy and democratic theory: the design of environmental knowledge cannot be divorced from the styles of democracy being endorsed.
Seminar chair: Emma Tompkins
Date: 16th May 2012
Time: 4pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre A (Room 1041) Shackleton Building 44,
Highfield Campus, Southampton.
For more information, please contact [email protected].