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...
Essays & Blog Posts
‘Grasping the Intangible – Our Climate Change Predicament’
In the summer of 2021, my book ‘Climate Change’ was published by Routledge in their Key Ideas in Geography series. It has been selling steadily in the months following and is now being picked up on reading lists around the world and through citations. It has also been reviewed in a few places, the latest […]
The 2022 UK Summer In Long-Term Perspective
With the summer season in the UK now over, it is instructive to place the hot, dry summer we have experienced into the longest possible historical perspective. How hot was the summer of 2022 as a whole? How dry...
Has the latest climate change issue-attention cycle peaked?
Last month, Sky News moved its flagship daily climate show from its primetime slot of 8.30pm into the dead of the afternoon, a 15-minute weekday airing at 3.30pm. (It also announced that a new in-depth weekend programme would be...
‘Climate alone won’t define future worlds’
In response to Zeke Hausfather’s and colleagues’ commentary in Nature on 4 May 2022 about the problem of “hot” climate models, I had published today in Nature a short ‘correspondence’ item. The item is reproduced below. My point was to focus on their (rather casual) claim that “…despite some differences related to the rate of […]
Why Closing Schools During The Pandemic Was Child Abuse
The Spectator this week ran the story I reproduce below, in which journalist Ross Clark asked the question ‘How much did the pandemic harm children?’ Actually the question being answered by Clark really is, ‘How much did Governments’ closures...
‘Classics in human geography’: The science and politics of climate change
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 […]
Why Governing Pandemics Using Models is Dangerous
Do you remember the headline in The Guardian newspaper from 18 December 2021: “UK scientists: Bring in new curbs now or face up to 2 million daily infections”? And whatever happened to the scenario of “6,000 COVID deaths per...
International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering
I have joined more than 60 senior climate scientists and governance scholars from around the world who have launched a global initiative today calling for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering. We argue that solar geoengineering deployment cannot...
‘Climate Change is Not the End of the World’
Professor Mike Hulme insists that the Church should not fuel young people’s eco-anxieties (This column appeared in The Church of England newspaper, 12 November 2021 issue) There has been a troubling rise in recent years amongst young adults and...
