I am interested to receive approaches from students who would like to study for a PhD with me in the areas of the cultural history of climate change, STS approaches to studying climate science and knowledge, representations and discourses of climate in the media, and the philosophy of climate and climate change. Please state clearly your […]
Author: Mike Hulme
Climatism and the Reification of Global Temperature
Over the last 40 years global-mean surface air temperature – ‘global temperature’ for short – has gained an extraordinary role in the science, politics and public discourse of climate change. What was once a number crudely calculated through averaging...
Against climate emergency
The recent Special Report from the IPCC on Global Warming of 1.5C (IPCC SR15) has (again) heightened the climate change rhetoric and generated another splurge of dramatic headlines: ‘We have 12 more years to limit climate change catastrophe’, ‘World...
The first climate scenario: a drama in three acts
The first scientific paper using the terminology of ‘scenario’ to describe the possible future evolution of climate was published in 1977 by the German meteorologist Hermann Flohn. It appeared as the first paper in the very first issue of...
London’s weather and the everyday: two centuries of newspaper reports
This new research article was published on 19 August 2018 in the Royal Meteorological Society’s journal Weather. (A pre-print of the article can be downloaded here). Written with one of my graduating geography students from King’s College London, Nick...
Latest articles in WIREs Climate Change, Vol 9(5), 2018
The latest issue of WIREs Climate Change, Volume 9(5) 2018, is now available on-line. The 9 review articles in this issue include Emma Tompkins and colleagues on taking a global stocktake of adaptation for the Paris Agreement, Frida...
WIREs Climate Change – rising impact factor
The new journal impact factors for 2017 announced in June show the growing citation success of the journal which I edit, WIREs Climate Change. Our Thomson-Reuters JIF for 2016 was 5.12, the highest we have been since the journal launched in 2010. This places WIREs Climate Change 5th in the ‘meteorology and atmospheric science’ […]
Epistemic geographies of climate change: science, space and politics
This review article, co-authored with Martin Mahony at the University of East Anglia (ex-University of Nottingham), was published on-line in December 2016 in the journal Progress in Human Geography and in print in June 2018 (Vol. 42, Issue 3,...
Climate in the Anthropocene
The idea of climate only makes sense when there is a degree of stability in some set of conditions, whether these be atmospheric, economic, political or moral. When everything is changing and no stable condition is possible — the...
‘Gaps’ in knowledge: do they exist? Can they be filled?…
This essay on ‘gaps in knowledge’ is now published in the journal Environmental Humanities. I analyse calls for knowledge gap-filling around climate change by asking and answering three specific questions: What sorts of knowledge are we dealing with? How...