Mike Hulme

• BSc, PhD, Geography
• Professor at University of Cambridge

Current climate engineering proposals do not come close to addressing the complex and contested nature of conceivable 'climate emergencies' resulting from unabated greenhouse-gas emissions.

The IPCC has been successful at building its scientific authority, but it will require institutional reform for staying relevant to new and changing political contexts. Exploring a range of alternative future pathways for the IPCC can help guide crucial decisions about redefining its purpose. With the release of its Synthesis Report in March 2023,...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become a hugely influential institution. It is the authoritative voice on the science on climate change, and an exemplar of an intergovernmental science-policy interface. This book introduces the IPCC as an institution, covering its origins, history, processes, participants, products, and inf...

Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to...

Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to...

The idea of the carbon budget is a powerful conceptual tool to define and quantify the climate challenge. Whilst scientists present the carbon budget as the geophysical foundation for global net-zero targets, the financial metaphor of a budget implies figuratively the existence of a ‘budget manager’ who oversees the budget balance. Using this ficti...

In this paper we draw on Science and Technology (STS) approaches to develop a comparative analytical account of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The establishment of both of these organizations, in 1988 and 2012 respectively, repres...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was constituted by the United Nations in 1988 to conduct periodic assessments of scientific knowledge pertaining to climate change. To date it has published five full‐scale assessment reports, together with a significant number of special reports. These reports are produced by independent experts...

Social scientific knowledge in times of crisis: What climate change can learn from coronavirus (and vice versa) 1 | INTRODUCTION Crisis, by its very nature, requires decisive intervention. However, important questions can be obscured by the very immediacy of the crisis condition. What is the nature of the crisis? How it is defined (and by whom)? An...

Since the first Earth Day 50 years ago, it has become clear that it is easier to generate scientific insight into the ways human systems are altering the planet than it is to redirect those human systems to lessen their planetary impact. At the heart of this conundrum are divergent human values.

The idea of a changing climate has been present in most cultural formations throughout recorded history, and yet the latter decades of the twentieth century animated the idea of climate change is new and powerful ways. This essay reflects on the possible future of this idea, comparing approaches to climate change that frame it either as an engineer...

Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.

Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.

School children protesting about climate change in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany. Many recent civic protests have used the idea of ‘limited time’ in order to call for urgent new climate policies. This editorial introduces the WIREs Special Collection of articles that reflect on the question, ‘Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)?’ [Credit...

The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare aims to replicate the expansive reach of Shakespeare's global reputation. In pursuit of that vision, this work is transhistorical, international and interdisciplinary. Volume 1, Shakespeare's World, 1500–1660, includes a comprehensive survey of the world in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries li...

The publication of the IPCC Special Report on global warming of 1.5 oC paved the way for the rise of the political rhetoric of setting a fixed deadline for decisive actions on climate change. However, the dangers of such deadline rhetoric suggest the need for the IPCC to take responsibility for its report and openly challenge the credibility of suc...

Despite the ambitious temperature goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the pace of reducing global CO2 emissions remains sluggish. This creates conditions in which the idea of temperature ‘overshoot and peak-shaving’ is emerging as a possible strategy to meet the Paris goal. An overshoot and peak-shaving scenario rests upon the ‘temporary’ use of spec...

Media reporting of climate change plays a key role in shaping public perceptions and influencing climate policy. Scholarly debates about the representation of climate change in the mass media have largely concentrated on journalistic norms, expertise and ideology, on the role of imagery or on narrow aspects of language use. This study takes a diffe...

This study surveys 200 years of London's weather and its public reporting in newspapers to reveal some of the recurring modes of reporting and linguistic styles that are used to describe and make sense of the human experience of weather. These modes include: the cultural anxieties prompted by ‘unusual weather’, the visual dramas of ‘great storms’,...

The Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation's (HSRC) 2012 ocean fertilisation experiment introduced a controversial geoengineering technology to the First Nations village of Old Massett on the islands of Haida Gwaii in British Columbia. Local debate centred on conflicting interpretations of the potential environmental impacts of the project and on the...

Through their editorializing practices, leading international science journals such as Nature and Science interpret the changing roles of science in society and exert considerable influence on scientific priorities and practices. Here we examine nearly 500 editorials published in these two journals between 1966 and 2016 that deal with climate chang...

It was just over 10 years ago in 2007 that I was approached by John Wiley & Sons inquiring as to my interest in taking the lead editor’s role in shaping a new interdisciplinary review journal covering climate change. After 2 years of planning, the first issue of WIREs Climate Change was published in February 2010 and this issue marks the beginning...

Christopher J. Preston's use of the doctrine of double effect to claim that hypothetical climate engineers might very well be less culpable for climate harms than those who continue to emit greenhouse gases is unpersuasive. His argument rests shakily on the ability to determine and quantify climate harms and to distinguish forensically between thei...

For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change was a contrib...

There is a growing sense that religion has a part to play in shaping our responses to climate change. Merely understanding climate science, or dealing with it through the frame of technology is clearly insuffi cient. Religious engagement with climate change is both necessary and inevitable. But there is much to discover about how religious beliefs,...

Several studies have been using quantified consensus within climate science as an argument to foster climate policy. Recent efforts to communicate such scientific consensus attained a high public profile but it is doubtful if they can be regarded successful. We argue that repeated efforts to shore up the scientific consensus on minimalist claims su...

Anthropogenic climate change has been presented as the archetypal global problem, identified by the slow work of assembling a global knowledge infrastructure, and demanding a concertedly global political response. But this ‘global’ knowledge has distinctive geographies, shaped by histories of exploration and colonialism, by diverse epistemic and ma...

How climate models came to gain and exercise epistemic authority has been a key concern of recent climate change historiography. Using newly released archival materials and recently conducted interviews with key actors, we reconstruct negotiations between UK climate scientists and policymakers which led to the opening of the Hadley Centre for Clima...

Climate is an enduring idea of the human mind and also a powerful one. Today, the idea of climate is most commonly associated with the discourse of climate-change and its scientific, political, economic, social, religious and ethical dimensions. However, to understand adequately the cultural politics of climate change it is important to establish t...

The Paris Agreement contains an ambition to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 [deg]C above pre-industrial levels, changing the context for policy-relevant research and extending a challenge to the IPCC and researchers.

‘We are familiar with statements by elderly people, such as ‘The winters were colder and the snows deeper when I was a youngster’. So reported American meteorologist J.B. Kincer in one of the earliest scientific papers to draw attention to the worldwide climate warming underway in the 1920s and 1930s.1 Kincer’s report highlights the ‘when I was you...

Why does climate change continue to be a forceful idea which divides people? What does this tell us about science, about culture, and about the future? Despite disagreement, how might the idea of climate change nevertheless be used creatively? In this essay I develop my investigation of these questions using four lines of argument. First, the futur...

This chapter reflects on the aspiration for climate governance from the perspective of knowledge and its relationship with different understandings of agency and democracy. It first offers a short historical perspective on the changing relationship between knowledge and culture in the context of enduring human attempts to bring order to the disorde...

Castree’s essay advocates for geographers to engage directly, and critically, with the new international networks and institutions giving shape and direction to the Anthropocene narrative. Reflecting on my own career in-and-out of geography, I suggest that such ‘fifth column’ activity is not for all geographers. Social change originates across many...

There has been much public comment on the recent Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis. Not least this has come from climate change commentators, communicators and policy advocates welcoming the Pope’s engagement with the issue. In this short commentary I want to question whether this Papal intervention is really about climate change, or even about the...

This afterword draws together insights from all of the chapters around themes of causation, representation, and instrumentalism. It explores the role of climate as an index, as embodied in the term climatic change, versus climate as an agent, as in the term climate change. In the former, climate is a descriptor of change; in the latter, it is a cau...

This paper asks how the social sciences can engage with the idea of the Anthropocene in productive ways. In response to this question we outline an interpretative research agenda that allows critical engagement with the Anthropocene as a socially and culturally bounded object with many possible meanings and political trajectories. In order to facil...

What are humans doing to the Earth's atmosphere? Changing it, yes, as was acknowledged in the first international political meeting on climate change, held in Toronto in June 1988, called The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security. But are humans also damaging or destroying the atmosphere, as implied in the 1980s narrative of the dep...

Geographers and Geography has long been acquainted with the idea of climate. For much of the last century, climatology was one of the canonical sub-fields of physical geography and interactions between climate and the human world have proved fruitful sites of geographical inquiry. Although much contemporary scholarship and applied science is concer...

Climate is an enduring idea and also a powerful one; and, like any interesting word, it defies easy definition. The idea of climate today is most commonly associated with the discourse of climate change and its scientific, political, economic, religious, ethical and social dimensions. I have written about these in Why We Disagree About Climate Chan...

Scientific research on climate change has given rise to a variety of images picturing climate change. These range from colorful expert graphics, model visualizations, photographs of extreme weather events like floods, droughts or melting ice, symbols like polar bears, to animated and interactive visualizations. Climate change graphics have not only...

The prominent Australian earth scientist, Tim Flannery, closes his recent book Here on Earth: A New Beginning with the words " … if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further progress is possible here on Earth ". This is a remarkable conclusion to his magisterial survey of the state of...

Over the last 30 years, scientific research has increasingly implicated human activities in contemporary regional- to global-scale climatic change. Over the last decade, this research has extended to the detection of the fingerprint of human activities on individual extreme weather events. Is it possible to say that this or that weather extreme was...

The role and design of global expert organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) needs rethinking. Acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all model does not exist, we suggest a reflexive turn that implies treating the governance of expertise...

Climate change seems to be an insurmountable problem. Political solutions have so far had little impact. Some scientists are now advocating the so-called ‘Plan B’ – a more direct way of reducing the rate of warming by reflecting more sunlight back into space through the creation of a thermostat in the sky. In this book Mike Hulme argues against thi...

We discuss how global heating is used in comparison to global warming, look at its semantic history and examine the communicative problems it may pose and the confusion it may lead to.

The first issue of WIREs (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews) Climate Change appeared in January 2010 and nearly 4 years later the journal has published over 200 review articles at the average rate of more than one per week. Over these 4 years, the journal has made a unique, visible, and valuable contribution to the burgeoning and broadening scholarsh...

Bridges is the free, online magazine of the OSTA published by Office of Science & Technology Austria, located in Washington D.C.

Effective and just decisionmaking on geoengineering will require greater appreciation of the diverse ways in which people conceive of and relate to the idea of climate control. This study targets the UK national press as a domain in which to begin intercepting discourses of geoengineering forming within the UK. Frame analysis is conducted and the i...

Background: Anthropogenic climate change will affect global food production, with uncertain consequences for human health in developed countries. Objectives: We investigated the potential impact of climate change on food security (nutrition and food safety) and the implications for human health in developed countries. Methods: Expert input and stru...

This article tracks the historical emergence of a new visual convention in the representation of the risks associated with climate change. The “reasons for concern” or “burning embers” diagram has become a prominent visual element of the climate change debate. By drawing on a number of cultural resources, the image has gained a level of discursive...

In this progress report on climate change, I examine the growing literature dealing with the proposal to engineer global climate through the deliberate injection of aerosols into the stratosphere. This is just one of a wide range of technology proposals to geoengineer the climate, but one in particular which has gained the attention of Earth System...

The intergovernmental body for biodiversity must draw on a much broader range of knowledge and stakeholders than the IPCC, say Esther Turnhout and colleagues.

Articulated initially by physical scientists, the idea of anthropogenic global climate change has been subject to increasingly diverse examinations in recent years. The idea has been appropriated by economists, worked with by engineers and, more recently, scrutinised by social scientists and humanities scholars. Underlying these examinations are di...

This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaff...

The need for policy makers to understand science and for scientists to understand policy processes is widely recognised. However, the science-policy relationship is sometimes difficult and occasionally dysfunctional; it is also increasingly visible, because it must deal with contentious issues, or itself becomes a matter of public controversy, or b...

The questions submitted to this exercise. (DOCX)

Outputs from climate simulation models have become pivotal in thinking about the planetary future on multi-generational time-scales, but are these outputs effective in helping humans to engage imaginatively and creatively with the future? Have we deferred too much and too often to climate models to ‘crystal-ball’ the future for us? This talk will c...

International funds created largely for funding climate adaptation programs and projects in developing countries were first legally established through the seventh session of the Conference of the Parties (COP-7) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) held in 2001 at Marrakesh. In 2009, at COP-15 in Copenhagen, delegate...

IN THEIR POLICY FORUM “THE BIODIVERsity and ecosystem services science-policy interface” (4 March, p. 1139), C. Perrings et al. frame the new Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as a body responsible primarily for assessment. They consistently base their elaboration of the work of IPBES on the experiences of pa...