The academic publisher Sage, have launched a new climate journal, titled ‘Dialogues on Climate Change‘, edited by Dr Rob Bellamy at the University of Manchester. I was invited to write a short essay about the IPCC for the inaugural issue and this has now been published. I reproduce the abstract below:

“The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been at the forefront of climate science and policy for more than 35 years. Many commentators hold up the IPCC as a model for how global knowledge should be assessed, communicated and employed in complex, transnational, public policy challenges. In this essay, I lay out some reasons why other science-policy issues might indeed be envious of the IPCC, but also suggest a number of reasons why replication of the IPCC in other topic areas might be difficult and why it might not necessarily be desirable.”

Mike Hulme, 5 November 2024