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, […]
Publications – Recent
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 Hulme, updated 31 December, 2020 (link refreshed 12 January 2021).
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...
New publication: ‘Climate migration myths’
I am a co-author on this new commentary in Nature Climate Change published today, led by my colleagues Ingrid Boas from Wageningen University and Carol Farbotko at Griffith University, Australia. Abstract. Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate...
Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)? – an editorial
Today, WIREs Climate Change publishes on-line a special collection of nine opinion articles from hand-picked scholars around the world who each, in their own way, answer the question ‘Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)?’ You can...
Climate Emergency Politics is Dangerous
Read my latest essay in Issues in Science & Technology, Volume 36, Fall 2019 Issue. Summary: Declarations of emergencies create ‘states of exception,’ often justified by governments under conditions of war, insurrection, or terrorist threat. Emergencies promise the mass...
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...
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...
Telling one story, or many? An ecolinguistic analysis of climate change stories in UK national newspaper editorials
This article, co-written with one of my Master’s students from King’s College London–Cherry Norton, has been published today in the journal Geoforum. The abstract is reproduced below. Media reporting of climate change plays a key role in shaping public...