The opening of the Oscar-winning film The Big Short, a comedy-drama on the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, begins with a famous quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Co-authored with my colleague Shin Asayama, read more at The Conversation […]
Why setting a climate deadline is dangerous
The publication of the IPCC Special Report on global warming of 1.5 oC paved the way for the rise of the political rhetoric of setting a fixed deadline for decisive actions on climate change. However, the dangers of such deadline rhetoric suggest the need for the IPCC to take responsibility for its report and openly […]
Climate, armed conflict and the problem of attribution slippage
A new paper in the journal Nature explores the role of climate as a risk factor in armed conflict. It is interesting for a number of reasons, not least since it uses the method of expert elicitation to explore...
Environmental Knowledges and the Politics of Expertise
I convene this Part 2 (final year) undergraduate course in the Department of Geography at Cambridge and co-teach it with Dr Amy Donovan and Dr Maan Barua. The course is concerned with the making and using of different kinds of environmental knowledges, engaging with literature from the geographies of science, science and technology studies and […]
Latest articles in WIREs Climate Change, Vol 10(4), 2019
The latest issue of WIREs Climate Change, Volume 10(4) 2019, is now available on-line. The 9 review articles in this issue include Jakob Skovgaard and Harro van Asselt on the politics of fossil fuel subsidies, Sophie Chiari on...
Engineering climate debt
My colleague Shin Asayama and I have co-authored this new paper, titled “Engineering climate debt: temperature overshoot and peak-shaving as risky subprime mortgage lending”, which is now available open-access online in the journal Climate Policy. In this paper, we...
Previous PhD Students
I have acted as primary supervisor for 15 PhD students, all of whom have successfully completed their doctorates. I have also been external or internal examiner for a further 25 PhD theses, in the UK, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands. Chaya Vaddhanaphuti (2017): Experiencing and performing in the field: how do Northern Thai farmers make […]
Debating Climate Change: A New Book
It is unusual to find myself agreeing with Nigel Farage. But a comment he made a few months ago about the importance of teaching critical thinking at British universities puts him on my side. “Ultimately it seems to me...
The Nobel Conference: Climate Changed
This September, I shall be speaking at the 2019 Nobel Conference at Adolphus Gustavus College at St.Peter, Minnesota. The Conference theme this year is ‘Climate Change: Facing Our Future’ and I shall be addressing the following questions: How do...
Am I a denier, a human extinction denier?
There has been a lot of talk recently about climate change and extinction. It is undoubtedly the case that species go extinct. And sometimes large numbers of species disappear together in mass events caused by the same physical stresses....