Why We Disagree About Climate Change is a book about the idea of climate change: where it came from, what it means to different people in different places, and why we disagree about it. It is a book which also develops a different way of approaching the idea of climate change and of working with it.

I deliberately present climate change as an idea as much as I treat it as a physical phenomenon that can be observed, quantified and measured. This latter framing is how climate change is mostly understood by scientists, and how science has presented climate change to society over recent decades. But, as society has been increasingly confronted with the observable realities of climate change and heard of the dangers that scientists claim lie ahead, climate change has moved from being predominantly a physical phenomenon to being simultaneously a social phenomenon. And these two phenomena are very different. As we have slowly, and at times reluctantly, realised that humanity has become an active agent in the reshaping of physical climates around the world, so our cultural, social, political and ethical practices are reinterpreting what climate change means. Far from simply being a change in physical climates – a change in the sequences of weather experienced in given places – climate change has become an idea that now travels well beyond its origins in the natural sciences.