Why we disagree about climate change and what we might do about it

Abstract:  Widely discussed and controversial at that time, The Hartwell Paper (Prins et al 2010) claimed that “Rapid advance in addressing climate change is now possible for the first time in 15 years because global climate policy crashed in 2009 at Copenhagen.” Some new principles were introduced into the climate policy discussion:

The Hartwell paper proposed a radical oblique approach: we need to provide energy access equitably to all the world’s population, while at the same time lightening the human footprint on the planet. Solutions should be relentlessly pragmatic, bottom up, and focused on criteria of human dignity and public health, not grandiose and grand-standing global targets and timetables, based on ‘catastrophic imperative’ narratives and a deficit model of public knowledge of science. We need a clear and calm understanding of the cultural reasons for that fractured framing. Climate change is a wicked problem, which cannot be ‘solved’ but only managed more or less intelligently. The forthcoming 2013 “Hartwell on Innovation” will shortly contribute more inconvenient truths to help secure that valuable prize.

Biography: Professor Gwythian Prins, MA, PhD (Cantab), FRHS, took a Double First in History at Cambridge where, after election to his Research Fellowship he completed his doctoral research in African history and anthropology. He was security consultant to the Hadley Centre for Climate Research at the UK Met Office for several years at the turn of the century. Today, he is a research professor at the London School of Economics and the director of the LSE Mackinder Programme. For over twenty years previously, he was a Fellow, Tutor and the Director of Studies in History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.  Professor Prins first published on climate history in the 1970s. He has contributed to the high-level policy dialogue on climate change as an advisor to governments and as an author: Time to Ditch Kyoto and as lead author of the Hartwell Paper.