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
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...
Engineering climate debt
My colleague Shin Asayama and I have co-authored this new paper, titled “Engineering climate debt: temperature overshoot and peak-shaving as risky subprime mortgage lending”, which is now available open-access online in the journal Climate Policy. In this paper, we...
Debating Climate Change: A New Book
It is unusual to find myself agreeing with Nigel Farage. But a comment he made a few months ago about the importance of teaching critical thinking at British universities puts him on my side. “Ultimately it seems to me...
The Nobel Conference: Climate Changed
From 24-25 September, I shall be speaking at the 2019 Nobel Conference at Adolphus Gustavus College at St.Peter, Minnesota. My talk ‘Beyond Climate Solutionism’ will be live-streamed here. The Conference theme this year is ‘Climate Change: Facing Our Future’...
Am I a denier, a human extinction denier?
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
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, 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
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.
Telling one story, or many? An ecolinguistic analysis of climate change stories in UK national newspaper editorials
This article, co-written with one of my Master’s students from King’s College London–Cherry Norton, has been published today in the journal Geoforum. The abstract is reproduced below. Media reporting of climate change plays a key role in shaping public...
