© Cambridge 105 Radio/YouTubeProfessor Mike Hulme
Young people are terrified that climate change will destroy Earth by the time they grow up, but the world is not actually ending, argues Cambridge professor Mike Hulme.
Humanity is not teetering on a cliff's edge, he says, at risk of imminent catastrophe if we don't reach net-zero carbon emissions by a certain date. And he has made it his mission to call out the people who claim we are.
In his most recent book, Climate Change Isn't Everything, Hulme argued that belief in the urgent fight against climate change has shot far past the territory of science and become an ideology.
Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, dubs this ideology 'climatism,' and he argues that it can distort the way society approaches the world's ills, placing too much focus on slowing Earth from warming.
Comment: Probably the most interesting thing about this story (aside from just how intelligent whales are) is that there are some scientists (like those at SETI) who still continue this kind of work on the pretense that humans have not yet been communicating with 'aliens,' however secretly, for a good many decades already. But a paycheck is a paycheck, and studying whale behavior sounds like a lot of fun!