ABSTRACT
Climate change can no longer be seen as a technical problem to sit alongside other policy problems, to be managed with a specific set of techniques and innovations. The real limit imposed by the reality of climate change is the limit to the globalization of trade and ideology. M. Hulme explores that current constructions of climate change risk, such as the two degree dangerous limit, are an attempt to merge physical and cultural determinants of risk into one single metric, and it is this misconception of climate risk that lies at the heart of the failure to develop an effective response. Replacing democratic deliberation on acceptable climate risk with a top-down discourse of 'science says two degrees is a dangerous limit' is a primary example of how climate change has been depoliticized and removed from the democratic sphere. The purpose of the European integration was from the start to create a protected sphere, protected from an excess of democracy.
