It is important not to over-react to the news that Donald Trump wishes to withdraw the USA from the Paris Agreement and seek to renegotiate a ‘fairer deal’ for America. The wailing and grieving around the media that has accompanied yesterday’s announcement is exactly the sort of reaction that Trump is seeking to provoke. It […]
Essays & Blog Posts
Political populism and sustainability
The first response of a scientist or scholar to surprising physical or cultural events is to want to understand them. And in this spirit, my reaction to the political events of 2016, and potentially to those yet to come,...
“Deadline-ism”: when is it too late?
Last Thursday was the first day of December 2016. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the date. Except that it was exactly 100 months since Andrew Simms and the New Economics Foundation announced that the world had only 100...
Book review of ‘A cultural history of climate change’ (Bristow & Ford, 2015)
A cultural history of climate change, edited by Tom Bristow and Thomas H Ford, Abingdon and New York, Earthscan/Routledge, 2016, xix + 244 pp., ISBN 978-1-138-83816-1 (hbk); ISBN 978-1-315-73459-1 (pbk). (Review appeared in Green Letters: Studies in Eco-criticism, vol.21(1),...
The future of climate (abridged from ‘Weathered’)
My latest book Weathered: Cultures of Climate is published tomorrow (17 November) by Sage. Here, I offer a heavily abridged version of the final chapter of the book, ‘The future of climate’. Cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai has argued...
Anglophone Political Populism and the Future of Climate-Change
Today’s result in the US Presidential election follows hard on the back of the UK’s Brexit vote in June. Both results – an expression of collective public preference from the electorate – have shaken political and cultural establishments on...
The role of language in the climate change debate
I have written this Foreword to the forthcoming book edited by Kjersti Fløttum, ‘The role of language in the climate change debate‘, due out with Routledge in 2017. Foreword In March 2015 the BBC screened a 90 minute TV...
Governing the environment in the early Modern world
I have written this Foreword to the forthcoming book edited by Sara Miglietti and John Morgan, ‘Governing the environment in the early Modern world: theory and practice‘, due out with Routledge in 2017. Foreword The idea of anthropogenic climate-change,...
Living with climate change, with or without the Paris Agreement
Given what has gone before, the Paris Agreement on climate change is certainly an impressive achievement of international negotiation. But what countries will be signing-up to, should they ratify it, is hardly going to reduce the challenges of dealing with a changing climate. And it has very little to contribute to addressing the chronic deficiencies […]
Is climate change to blame for Syrian civil war?
(30 November) Blog Post: ‘Is climate change really to blame for Syria’s civil war?’ Jan Selby and I answer this question with a ‘no’.
