As part of the Leverhulme Trust research project ‘Making Climate History’**, which ran from 2019 to 2025, I oversaw the oral history element of the project which enabled us to conduct interviews with eleven climate scientists, and one climate journalist, who were active in the science of climate change in the 1970s and early 1980s.
This collection of interviews – both the original audio files and the cleaned-up transcripts – is now publicly available through the University of Cambridge Library. The interviews were conducted between 2021 and 2024 by myself, Dr Sarah Dry, an independent scholar and historian of science, Dr Tom Simpson (now at the University of Warwick) and Dr Alexis Rider (now at the University of Vienna).
Some of these interviews have been used by Sarah Dry and myself to inform our writing of ‘When Temperature Became Global: A Brief History of the World’s Most Important Index‘, a book to be published by Princeton University Press in the first months of 2027.
** (The Leverhulme grant was awarded jointly to Professor Richard Staley (PI) and myself and Professor Simon Schaffer (as co-PIs) at the University of Cambridge).
Mike Hulme, March 2026
