Some commonsense (at last) on living with Sars-CoV-2

Mike Hulme | 21/09/2020

Amidst the panic and fear, here is a sensible perspective on living with COVID-19 risk, articulated by responsible people who understand the sociology, psychology and statistics of risk. It’s time to listen to these experts rather than epidemiological modellers...

The Finch podcast: What is climate change?

Mike Hulme | 09/09/2020

You can listen here to my podcast with The Finch, a student-based discussion platform run out of the University of Georgia, Athens, which introduces their new podcast series on climate change. I discuss the following quesitons … Is there...

Climate Change [Key Ideas in Geography]

Mike Hulme | 08/09/2020

[Image courtesy Dehlia Hannah] I have just completed the manuscript for a new book titled ‘Climate Change’, which will appear in the spring of 2021 in the Routledge Series of Key Ideas in Geography, edited by Noel Castree &...

WIREs Climate Change celebrates 10 years

Mike Hulme | 10/08/2020

The two professional associations that sponsor Wiley’s WIREs Climate Change – the Royal Geographical Society (with the IBG) and the Royal Meteorological Society – recognise the landmark as the journal passes it’s 10 year anniversary. During this period over...

Defending “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”

Mike Hulme | 24/07/2020

Having just finished reading Dorian Lynsky’s wonderful Ministry of Truth, a biography of George Orwell’s 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty Four, a recent headline from The Times newspaper caught my attention. The Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker was accusing...

Fetishising ‘The Number’: How Not To Govern Pandemics, Climate and Biodiversity

Mike Hulme | 09/07/2020

As the pandemic continues to dominate public politics around the world, a single number – the reproduction rate (R) – has become the focus of policy-making and public communication. Keeping R below 1.0 appears to be the primary objective...

How the Hadley Centre came to be … 30 years ago

Mike Hulme | 30/05/2020

Thirty years ago last week, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opened the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction (now the Hadley Centre for Cliamate Science and Services). The current Director – Albert Klein Tank – has offered a brief ‘perspective‘ and...

Social scientific knowledge in times of crisis: What climate change can learn from coronavirus (and vice versa)

Mike Hulme | 29/05/2020

Read this new editorial commentary from WIREs Climate Change, written with colleagues from Orebro University, Sweden. Abstract. Crisis, by its very nature, requires decisive intervention. However, important questions can be obscured by the very immediacy of the crisis condition....

COVID-19 behind the numbers – statistics, models and decision-making

Mike Hulme | 28/05/2020

You can view this recorded webinar delivered on-line on Thursday 14 May for Cambridge Conversations, the Alumni Programme. “Unpick the numbers behind COVID-19 with Sir David Spiegelhalter, one of the world’s foremost biostatisticians, and Mike Hulme, professor of human...

Do Not Reduce the Future to Covid-19

Mike Hulme | 27/04/2020

Nearly 10 years ago I published a paper in the history of science journal Osiris titled Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism. It was a warning about viewing the future—and making decisions about...

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