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.
Essays & Blog Posts
Climate change and Brexit: what to do when negotiations lead nowhere?
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
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
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...
Climate in the Anthropocene
The idea of climate only makes sense when there is a degree of stability in some set of conditions, whether these be atmospheric, economic, political or moral. When everything is changing and no stable condition is possible — the...
‘Gaps’ in knowledge: do they exist? Can they be filled?…
This essay on ‘gaps in knowledge’ is now published in the journal Environmental Humanities. I analyse calls for knowledge gap-filling around climate change by asking and answering three specific questions: What sorts of knowledge are we dealing with? How...
‘Disagreement is always good’ – an interview with Mike Hulme
Following my talk to the K3 Congress on Climate Change Communication in Salzburg last October, I was interviewed by the Deutsches Klima Konsortium (K3) website: “After the conference, author and professor Mike Hulme sat down with us to talk about...
‘We Always Get the Weather We Deserve’: The Tenacious Grip of Moral Accountability
[This essay is forthcoming in Gnosis, The Italian Journal of Intelligence.] Abstract: Different cosmologies, religious thought, political ideologies, social practices and scientific paradigms of knowledge all contribute to the rich cultural matrix in which theories of climatic change and...
Weather-Worlds in the Anthropocene and the End of Climate
This new essay has been written as a contribution to a collaborative double issue of the journal Weber with the Rachel Carson Center, on the theme ‘Transformations of the Anthropocene’. It is scheduled to appear in autumn 2018 (Issue...
Climate Change and the Significance of Religion
Published in today’s issue of Economic & Political Weekly in India, this Essay argues that there is a growing sense that religion has a part to play in shaping our responses to climate change. Merely understanding climate science, or...
