Discussing a tendency in contemporary politics to reduce issues to questions of scientific measures of climate change, Mike Hulme argues for more diverse understandings of climate and change and its impacts on society. I discussed these ideas in my lecture at the London School of Economics, ‘Epistemic Pluralism and Climate Change’ on 10 March 2025, […]
Essays
The Tyndall Centre at 25 Years: Bidding for the Contract
Twenty-five years ago today – on Wednesday 22 March 2000 – I arrived at the Institute of Directors at 116 Pall Mall, London, at 10.30am in the morning prepared to deliver the most important presentation of my life. I was to defend our proposal for establishing a new national climate change research centre in front […]
Geopolitics, History and Climate Change: A Personal View
“To think that we can draw some useful analogies from history dramatically underestimates the novelty and scale of the climate challenge.”[2] “In the contest between geopolitics and sustainable climate policies, the former takes precedence.”[3] Starting in the early 1980s,...
Climatism and Its Discontents: Why Net-Zero Obsession is Unfair to the World’s Poor
The ideology of climatism has dangerous implications for societies, especially for countries such as India whose development trajectory and ambition requires them to pursue a plurality of goals. You can read here my op-ed for India’s OutlookBusiness, an abridged...
‘The dangerous obsession with Net-Zero’
Despite a heated debate at COP28 over whether the world should be phasing-out fossil fuels altogether, the governmental delegates in the end agreeing rather to “transition away from fossil fuels”, Net Zero remains the collectively agreed target. But as I argue in this post for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, Net Zero is both […]
Learning to Disagree Well
In her first Annual Address to Senate House since her inauguration in July as Cambridge Vice-Chancellor, Deborah Prentice highlighted the imperative for university students to learn to “disagree well” on difficult subjects. To facilitate this learning, Prentice intends to...
Review: “Inside the World of Climate Change Sceptics”
Read here my review, to appear in Public Understanding of Science, of Kristin Haltinner and Dilshani Sarathchandra’s new book. As I conclude my review … “[T]he art of politics is not to get everyone to agree with you, but...
In Defence of the ‘Centre for Policy Research’, New Delhi
24 March 2023 I have lent my name to the following open letter, in which professors from universities in the USA, UK, Europe and Australia state why we are “shocked and dismayed” at the Government of India action against...
The Most Important Book of 2023
Those readers who followed my blog posts during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 will know I became increasingly frustrated and bewildered, then angry, and finally depressed, about the institutionalized responses to the COVID pandemic, which in my...
Meeting Vivienne Westwood
Vivienne Westwood died on the 29 December 2022. A larger than life character, I once had the opportunity to meet her – at her suggestion – to discuss her thoughts about climate change and a campaigning TV series, to...
