Climate ‘Medicines’ do not Alleviate the Symptoms of Climate Change

Mike Hulme | 29/08/2019

Sustaining popular support for long-run climate policies is confronted with a serious problem. In nearly all other areas of public policy there are manifest experiential benefits for citizens that result from policy implementation. But climate change is different. Citizens...

Betting on speculative geoengineering may risk an escalating ‘climate debt crisis’

Mike Hulme | 18/07/2019

The opening of the Oscar-winning film The Big Short, a comedy-drama on the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, begins with a famous quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Co-authored with my colleague Shin Asayama, read more at The Conversation […]

Climate, armed conflict and the problem of attribution slippage

Mike Hulme | 22/06/2019

A new paper in the journal Nature explores the role of climate as a risk factor in armed conflict. It is interesting for a number of reasons, not least since it uses the method of expert elicitation to explore...

Am I a denier, a human extinction denier?

Mike Hulme | 27/05/2019 | 1 Comment

There has been a lot of talk recently about climate change and extinction. It is undoubtedly the case that species go extinct. And sometimes large numbers of species disappear together in mass events caused by the same physical stresses....

Climate change narratives: beyond the facts of science

Mike Hulme | 03/05/2019

Extended text of a speech delivered to the Royal Society/British Academy Workshop on Narrative and Science, 2 May 2019, Royal Society, London ?] Mike Hulme, University of Cambridge In 2015, the BBC screened a documentary on climate change called...

Morality by numbers? Against the regulatory power of carbon metrics

Mike Hulme | 22/03/2019

Mike Hulme, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge Presented at ‘Multiple Carbons: Historical and Contemporary Approaches to Governance’ Friday-Saturday 5-6 April 2019, Harvard University’s Center for the Environment Introduction In 2007, a new web-site CheatNeutral offered an on-line service...

PhD to professor: a conversation with Mike Hulme

Mike Hulme | 15/02/2019

Read here my conversation with the Pembroke College blog about my career in geography, some of the decisions I took on the way from PhD to Professor, the importance of interdisciplinary networks, the challenges facing graduate students and academics today, and the value of a geographer’s approach to climate change.

Climate change and Brexit: what to do when negotiations lead nowhere?

Mike Hulme | 18/12/2018

Last week saw conclusions to the latest round of two sets of negotiations. One concerned the UK’s exit from the European Union (so-called Brexit) and the other the latest attempt by the world’s nations to consolidate a workable climate...

Climatism and the Reification of Global Temperature

Mike Hulme | 24/10/2018 | 2 Comments

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...

The first climate scenario: a drama in three acts

Mike Hulme | 29/08/2018

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...

Mike Hulme

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Essays & Blog Posts

Climate ‘Medicines’ do not Alleviate the Symptoms of Climate Change

Betting on speculative geoengineering may risk an escalating ‘climate debt crisis’

Climate, armed conflict and the problem of attribution slippage

Am I a denier, a human extinction denier?

Climate change narratives: beyond the facts of science

Morality by numbers? Against the regulatory power of carbon metrics

PhD to professor: a conversation with Mike Hulme

Climate change and Brexit: what to do when negotiations lead nowhere?

Climatism and the Reification of Global Temperature

The first climate scenario: a drama in three acts