Mike Hulme

Last updated

Mike Hulme
Born (1960-07-23) 23 July 1960 (age 63)
NationalityBritish
Alma mater Durham University
Swansea University
Scientific career
Fields Climatology
Human Geography
Institutions University of Cambridge
King's College London
University of East Anglia
University of Salford
Thesis Secular climatic and hydrological change in central Sudan  (1985)
Website www.mikehulme.org

Michael Hulme (born 23 July 1960) is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, and also a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was formerly professor of Climate and Culture at King's College London (2013-2017) and of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Contents

Early life and education

Mike Hulme attended Madras College secondary school from 1974 to 1978. [1] He obtained a B.Sc. (Hons) in geography from the University of Durham in 1981 and a Ph.D. in applied climatology from the University of Wales, Swansea in 1985. [2] His doctoral thesis was titled, Secular Climatic and Hydrological Change in Central Sudan. [3]

Academic career

In 1988, after four years lecturing in geography at the University of Salford, he became for 12 years a senior researcher in the Climatic Research Unit, part of the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. In October 2000 he founded the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a distributed virtual network organisation headquartered at UEA, which he directed until July 2007. [4] Hulme served on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) from 1995 to 2001. [5] He also contributed to the 2nd and 3rd Assessment Reports of the IPCC, for which Hulme received a personalised certificate acknowledging his contribution to the organisation, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, [6] [7]

He was the founding editor-in-chief (from 2008 to 2022) of the review journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change, [8] published by John Wiley & Sons. He was Head of the Department of Geography at King's College London in 2016 and 2017, and has been Head of the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge since 2022.

In 2020, he became a signatory to the Great Barrington Declaration. [9] The declaration, which called for an end to lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial. [10] [11]

Publications

He is best known as the author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change [12] published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press and which was named by The Economist in December 2009 as one of their four Books of Year for science and technology. [13] He is also the author of Weathered: Cultures of Climate [14] (SAGE, 2017), Reducing the Future to Climate: a Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism [15] (Osiris, 2011), and Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering (Polity, 2014). He has edited the books Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future, [16] "Climate policy options post-2012: European strategy, technology and adaptation after Kyoto" co-edited with Bert Metz and Michael Grubb [17] and in 2010, co-edited with Henry Neufeldt, Making Climate Change Work For Us: European Perspectives on Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies. In 2013 he published Exploring Climate Change Through Science and in Society: An Anthology of Mike Hulme's Essays, Interviews and Speeches, which brings together many of his more popular writings on climate change since the late 1980s. In recent years he has edited the volume Contemporary Climate Change Debates: A Student Primer (Routledge, 2020) and is the author of Climate Change (Key Ideas in Geography) (Routledge, 2021). In 2023 he published Climate Change Isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism , where he expands on what he terms climatism. [18]

Views about climate change

In 2008, Hulme made a personal statement on what he called the "5 lessons of climate change", as: [19]

  1. "climate change is a relative risk, not an absolute one"
  2. "climate risks are serious, and we should seek to minimise them"
  3. "our world has huge unmet development needs"
  4. "our current energy portfolio is not sustainable"
  5. "massive and deliberate geo-engineering of the planet is a dubious practice"

After the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, he wrote an article for the BBC in which he said:

At the very least, the publication of private CRU e-mail correspondence should be seen as a wake-up call for scientists – and especially for climate scientists. The key lesson to be learnt is that not only must scientific knowledge about climate change be publicly owned – the IPCC does a fair job of this according to its own terms – but that in the new century of digital communication and an active citizenry, the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned.

Mike Hulme [20] :1

In another article for the BBC, in November 2006, he warned against the dangers of using alarmist language when communicating climate change science. [21]

Mike Hulme is one of the authors of the Hartwell Paper, published by the London School of Economics in collaboration with the University of Oxford in May 2010. [22] The authors argued that, after what they regard as the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, the Kyoto Protocol crashed. They claimed that Kyoto had "failed to produce any discernible real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years." [22] [23] They argued that this failure opened an opportunity to set climate policy free from Kyoto and the paper advocates a controversial and piecemeal approach to decarbonization of the global economy. [24] [25] [26]

Religious views

Hulme is a self-proclaimed evangelical Christian, and member of the Church of England, who has been theologically influenced by the Fulcrum movement. [27] [28]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change</span> Scientific intergovernmental body on climate change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations. Its job is to advance scientific knowledge about climate change caused by human activities. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the IPCC in 1988. The United Nations endorsed the creation of the IPCC later that year. It has a secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, hosted by the WMO. It has 195 member states who govern the IPCC. The member states elect a bureau of scientists to serve through an assessment cycle. A cycle is usually six to seven years. The bureau selects experts to prepare IPCC reports. It draws the experts from nominations by governments and observer organizations. The IPCC has three working groups and a task force, which carry out its scientific work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kyoto Protocol</span> 1997 international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

The Kyoto Protocol (Japanese: 京都議定書, Hepburn: Kyōto Giteisho) was an international treaty which extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that commits state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and that human-made CO2 emissions are driving it. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005. There were 192 parties (Canada withdrew from the protocol, effective December 2012) to the Protocol in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Schneider (scientist)</span>

Stephen Henry Schneider was Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University, a Co-Director at the Center for Environment Science and Policy of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Senior Fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Schneider served as a consultant to federal agencies and White House staff in the Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Watson (chemist)</span> British chemist and atmospheric scientist (born 1948)

Sir Robert Tony Watson CMG FRS is a British chemist who has worked on atmospheric science issues including ozone depletion, global warming and paleoclimatology since the 1980s. Most recently, he is lead author of the February 2021 U.N. report Making Peace with Nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of East Anglia</span> Public university in Norwich, England

The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a 320-acre (130-hectare) campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and twenty-six schools of study. The university is a leading member of Norwich Research Park which has one of Europe's biggest concentrations of researchers in the fields of research in agriculture, genomics, health and the environment. With an annual research spend of £130 million, it has over thirty businesses and four independent world-renowned research institutes located on site and has the most BBSRC funded scientific institutes than anywhere else in the United Kingdom.

Climate Audit is a blog founded in 2005 by Steve McIntyre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phil Jones (climatologist)</span> Climatologist

Philip Douglas Jones is a former director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) from 1998, having begun his career at the unit in 1976. He retired from these positions at the end of 2016, and was replaced as CRU director by Tim Osborn. Jones then took up a position as a Professorial Fellow at the UEA from January 2017.

Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, the Department of Geosciences, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. He is the director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE) at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and Faculty Associate of the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Program and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

Pier Vellinga is an environmental scientist and one of the Netherlands' experts on the impacts of climate change.

The Climatic Research Unit email controversy began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.

The Kyoto Protocol was an international treaty which extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

<i>Why We Disagree About Climate Change</i> 2009 English-language book by Mike Hulme

Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity is a 2009 book by Mike Hulme. It was published by the Cambridge University Press. As of September 2017 it has sold over 18,000 copies. In 2009 it was selected by The Economist magazine as one of its science and technology 'Books of the Year' and in 2010 was jointly awarded the Gerald L Young Prize for the best book in human ecology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Hartwell Paper</span>

The Hartwell Paper called for a reorientation of climate policy after the perceived failure in 2009 of the UNFCCC climate conference in Copenhagen. It was a response to the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol, a previous international agreement meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The paper was published in May 2010 by the London School of Economics in cooperation with the University of Oxford. The authors are 14 natural and social scientists from Asia, Europe and North America, including Mike Hulme, Roger A. Pielke (Jr), Nico Stehr and Steve Rayner, who met under the Chatham House Rule.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Rayner</span> British social scientist

Steve Rayner was James Martin Professor of Science and Civilization at Oxford University and Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, a member of the Oxford Martin School. He described himself as an "undisciplined social scientist" having been trained in philosophy, comparative religion and political anthropology.

Freedom of Information requests to the Climatic Research Unit featured in press discussions of disputes over access to data from instrumental temperature records, particularly during the Climatic Research Unit email controversy which began in November 2009.

William R. Moomaw is the Professor Emeritus of International Environmental Policy at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. Moomaw has worked at the intersection of science and policy, advocating for international sustainable development. His activities have included being a long-time contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and an author on the seminal "Perspective" paper on proforestation.

The history of climate change policy and politics refers to the continuing history of political actions, policies, trends, controversies and activist efforts as they pertain to the issue of climate change. Climate change emerged as a political issue in the 1970s, where activist and formal efforts were taken to ensure environmental crises were addressed on a global scale. International policy regarding climate change has focused on cooperation and the establishment of international guidelines to address global warming. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is a largely accepted international agreement that has continuously developed to meet new challenges. Domestic policy on climate change has focused on both establishing internal measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and incorporating international guidelines into domestic law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Nicholls (professor)</span> Climate scientist, academic

Robert Nicholls is currently the Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and a professor of climate adaptation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom.

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Climate Change Isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism is a book by Mike Hulme published in 2023 by Polity Press.

References

  1. "Mike Hulme". Madras College Former Pupils. Archived from the original on 8 June 2017. Retrieved 19 July 2012.
  2. "Curriculum Vitae : Professor Mike Hulme" (PDF). August 2007. Retrieved 19 July 2012.
  3. Secular climatic and hydrological change in central Sudan. University College of Swansea. 1985. ISBN   9781107268890. OCLC   502360232.
  4. Hulme, Mike (13 May 2010). "Welcome". Mike Hulme. Retrieved 17 May 2010.
  5. "People | Department of Geography | King's College London".
  6. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 July 2011. Retrieved 19 June 2010.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  7. "The Nobel Peace Prizefor 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. - Press release - NobelPrize.org".
  8. "WIREs Climate Change" . Retrieved 10 November 2012.
  9. Fishwick, Samuel (13 October 2020). "'I've had emails calling me evil'... Meet the Covid scientists at war". Evening Standard. Retrieved 25 November 2020.
  10. Ahmed, Nafeez (3 October 2020). "Koch-Funded PR Agency Aided Great Barrington Declaration Sponsor". BylineTimes. Retrieved 13 October 2020.
  11. Lewandowsky, Stephan (1 December 2021). "Liberty and the pursuit of science denial". Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 42: 65–69. doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.02.024. hdl: 1983/eb39f213-982d-4f3c-89b5-8dca6cd3a6cf . ISSN   2352-1546. S2CID   233195044.
  12. "Why We Disagree About Climate Change". Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 1 June 2010.
  13. The Economist, 5 December 2009, p.94
  14. "Weathered: Cultures of Climate". SAGE. Retrieved 13 October 2017.
  15. Hulme, Mike (2011). "Reducing the Future to Climate: a Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism" (PDF). Osiris. 26: 245–266. doi:10.1086/661274. S2CID   143602187 . Retrieved 6 December 2017.
  16. Hulme, Michael; Barrow, Elaine (1997). Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future. Routledge. p. 326. ISBN   978-0-415-13016-5.
  17. Metz, Bert; Hulme, Mike; Grubb, Michael; Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (2005). Climate policy options post-2012: European strategy, technology and adaptation after Kyoto. Earthscan. ISBN   9781844072378.
  18. Hulme, M. (2023). Climate Change Isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism, 1st edition, Polity.
  19. Five Lessons of Climate Change: a personal statement (Archived at 2010-06-19) by Mike Hulme, March 2008
  20. Hulme, Mike; Jerome Ravetz (1 December 2009). "'Show Your Working': What 'ClimateGate' means". BBC. Retrieved 17 May 2010.
  21. Hulme, Mike (4 November 2006). "Chaotic world of climate truth". BBC. p. 1. Retrieved 17 May 2010.
  22. 1 2 Prins, Gwyn; et al. (May 2010). "The Hartwell Paper - A new direction for climate policy after the crash of 2009" (PDF). London School of Economics . Retrieved 12 May 2010.
  23. Mike Hulme (11 May 2010). "After the crash - a new direction for climate policy". BBC News . Retrieved 12 May 2010.
  24. Andrew C. Revkin (11 May 2010). "A Tough Observer of Climate Prescriptions". The New York Times . Retrieved 12 May 2010.
  25. "Oblique strategies". The Economist . 11 May 2010. Retrieved 12 May 2010.
  26. "Do You Heart 'The Hartwell Paper'?". Science Insider . 12 May 2010. Archived from the original on 28 May 2010. Retrieved 12 May 2010.
  27. "Affiliations and Influences | Mike Hulme". Archived from the original on 19 April 2014. Retrieved 18 April 2014.
  28. Williams, Andrew Zak (20 April 2011). "Iâ?Tm a believer". New Statesman.