Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination [Paperback]

It has taken a while for scholarship from the arts and social sciences to start getting into issues and debates around climate change in a serious way, and it is very exciting now that the conversation is happening. This is an impressive collection of authors and perspectives that takes the discussion on climate change into a new and useful area.

First I must declare an interest. I am the author of the foreword of this book. I would not normally review on Amazon a book to which I am a prominent contributor for reason of conflict of interest. However, I am doing so on this occasion because I think it is a pity that a young researcher's edited scholarly collection has had its ratings torpedoed by a 1 star review by a reviewer who clearly has it in for climate change.

Stefan has pulled together some important contributions on the wider "Mythos" within which the apocalyptic discourse of climate change takes place. Many of the papers in the collection will be of interest to policy makers, sociologists and theologians who study climate change. The only down side to such a book is for the general, non-academic reader, for whom some of the scholarly shorthand and positioning can be a barrier to understanding - a problem that is, of course, shared by most academic collections and certainly, nearly all that I have been previously involved with.

As Arctic sea ice this past few days hits its lowest level ever documented in the instrumental record, and as extreme weather events the world over break literally thousands of records, a lot of vulnerable people in the world might be forgiven for thinking that they feel the breath of apocalypse beating down their necks. Future Ethics is not a book about the science of climate change as such. Rather, it examines the apocalyptic perception of events such as shapes people's responses and the political environment in which action, or inaction, takes place. This is what makes it an important contribution to the debate, and why it deserves to be read and reviewed in such terms.

Academics have some responsibility to write clearly about problems of today, but the academics who have contributed to this book seem to have lost that ability. They have written chapters which claim to address the most pressing problem of the age: climate change. Far from being a pressing problem, it is the least of our current concerns, as we face an ongoing banking crisis and an additional crisis in the eurozone, as the Euro finally melts down, and the economies of europe are further depressed. The euro crisis has been exacerbated by the kind of writing exhibited by this book, which has led europe to adopt renewable energy as a way to solve global warming. In the first place, the world in the last decade has been cooling, so the dire predictions of the IPCC have not occurred (what countries have disappeared beneath the sea?), and it is highly unlikely that they will ever occur. There is no "consensus" among climatologists about AGW, and a growing number of distinguished scientists are and have been challenging the conclusions of the IPCC (at least 400 by a recent count). When it comes to ethics, the proponents of the discredited theory of AGW have been unscrupulous in massaging data to show what they have already decided, and refused access to independents to even see that data (as exposed by the Climategate emails). They have gone yet further in spinning a tissue of untruths about the alleged problem, highlighted by Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (the exaggerations of the film were exposed in the High Court a few years ago). The authors of this book seem to be quite unaware of such problems, which erode the very basis of the arguments they propound. Meanwhile other countries are tackling real problems like poverty by their own actions, the shining example being China, which has grown spectacularly by its own efforts in using low cost energy from coal. The EC policy of renewable energy now looks hopelessly defunct, and imposes an extra burden on the very industry that they hope will bring euroland out of recession. I would suggest to this group of academics that there are much worthier targets for their angst, especially the ethics of torture and aggressive war (in Iraq and Afghanistan), the ethics of banking, noble cause corruption, and poverty in the world. They then might address real problems rather than the fanciful ideas of global warming. Avoid this book.