In 2001, David Demeritt published an article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers titled, ‘The construction of global warming and the politics of science‘. It has been cited nearly 1000 times (Google Scholar). Now, more than two decades later, I and Rebecca Lave offer short retrospectives on the significance of Demeritt’s article […]
Publications – Recent
Reflections on the Afterlives of a PhD Thesis
This article has been just been published open-access in the RGS-IBG journal Area. Abstract Most readers of this essay will likely have written a PhD thesis, will be in the throes of writing one or perhaps will be aspiring...
Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis
I have two chapters in the recently published book with OpenBook Publishers in Cambridge, ‘Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis: Social Science Perspectives‘. This is a collection of 28 essays written by social scientists, and edited by Steffen Böhm, Exeter...
Balancing a budget or running a deficit? The offset regime of carbon removal and solar geoengineering under a carbon budget
In this new article, published today in the journal Climatic Change, my colleagues Shin Asayama and Nils Markusson and I examine a paradox of adopting a carbon budget as a policy tool. The very idea of a finite carbon...
Knowing like a global expert organisation
Synthesising nearly 10 years of primary research, including two PhD theses (Maud Borie and Martin Mahony) and a MSc thesis (Noam Obermeister), our systemic comparison of the ‘knowledge ways’ of the IPCC and IPBES is today published in the...
‘Climate change forever: the future of an idea’
This new essay (Vol. 136(1-4): 118-122) has appeared in the Special 2020 Issue of The Scottish Geographical Journal ‘Climate change, COP and the crucible of crisis‘. Abstract: The idea of a changing climate has been present in most cultural...
Climates Multiple: Three Baselines, Two Tolerances, One Normal
Today, Friday 1 January, 2021, the world’s climate is re-set. Overnight, the world will “become” about 0.5°C warmer, the UK nearly 0.7°C warmer. This essay, published at Academia Letters, explains what is happening, and discusses its wider significance. Mike...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
My updated entry on the IPCC has been published (September 2020) in the International Encyclopedia of Geography (from Wiley) Abstract: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was constituted by the United Nations in 1988 to conduct periodic assessments of scientific knowledge pertaining to climate change. To date it has published five full?scale assessment reports, […]
Social scientific knowledge in times of crisis: What climate change can learn from coronavirus (and vice versa)
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....
One Earth, many futures, no destination
Read my new Commentary in the journal One Earth, to mark the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. Since the first Earth Day 50 years ago, it has become clear that it is easier to generate scientific insight...
