Mike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has written a thoughtful, accurate, and brave op-ed for the BBC on the curent state of the climate debate. Here is how he begins:

Climate change is a reality, and science confirms that human activities are heavily implicated in this change.

But over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country – the phenomenon of “catastrophic” climate change.

It seems that mere “climate change” was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be “catastrophic” to be worthy of attention.

The increasing use of this pejorative term – and its bedfellow qualifiers “chaotic”, “irreversible”, “rapid” – has altered the public discourse around climate change.

This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as “climate change is worse than we thought”, that we are approaching “irreversible tipping in the Earth’s climate”, and that we are “at the point of no return”.

I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.

It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns.

His comments about being chastised for not going far enough in his pronouncements on climate change strike a chord very familiar to me. Comments by Mike Hulme echo those made by Steve Rayner, Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, and others. Could it be that we are seeing the emergence of more responsible leadership on climate change among the scientific community? It sure looks that way.

Thanks Mike for speaking out.