ABSTRACT
Mike Hulme has been studying climate change for over thirty years and is today one of the most distinctive and recognisable voices speaking internationally about climate change in the academy, in public and in the media. The argument that he has made powerfully over the last few years is that climate change has to be understood as much as an idea situated in different cultural contexts as it is as a physical phenomenon to be studied through universal scientific practices. Climate change at its core embraces both science and society, both knowledge and culture.
Hulme’s numerous academic and popular writings have explored what this perspective means for the different ways climate change is studied, narrated, argued over and acted upon. Exploring Climate Change through Science and in Society gathers together for the first time a collection of his most popular, prominent and controversial articles, essays, speeches, interviews and reviews dating back to the late 1980s. The 50 or so short items are grouped together in seven themes - Science, Researching, Culture, Policy, Communicating, Controversy, Futures - and within each theme are arranged chronologically to reveal changing ideas, evidence and perspectives about climate change. Each themed section is preceded with a brief introduction, drawing out the main issues examined. Three substantive unpublished new essays have been specially written for the book, including one reflecting on the legacy of Climategate.
Taken as a collection, these writings reveal the changes in scientific and public understandings of climate change since the late 1980s, as refracted through the mind and expression of one leading academic and public commentator. The collection shows the many different ways in which it is necessary to approach the idea of climate change to interpret and make sense of the divergent and discordant voices proclaiming it in the public sphere.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|11 pages
The public life of climate change
part 2|52 pages
Science
chapter 1|1 pages
Sahel awaits the rain
chapter 2|1 pages
Sea heat fuels hurricanes
chapter 3|1 pages
Cold facts about winters
chapter 4|2 pages
Nuclear autumn danger
chapter 5|2 pages
Generalists in hot pursuit
chapter 6|8 pages
Global warming in the twenty-first century: an issue for Less Developed Countries
chapter 7|3 pages
How good is technology's weather eye?
chapter 8|5 pages
Introducing climate change
chapter 9|3 pages
Climate of uncertainty
chapter 10|2 pages
There is no longer such a thing as a purely natural weather event
chapter 11|4 pages
Something to clear the air
chapter 12|3 pages
To what climate are we adapting?
chapter 13|4 pages
Do we need better predictions to adapt to a changing climate?
chapter 14|7 pages
On the origin of the greenhouse effect: John Tyndall's 1859 interrogation of Nature
part 3|45 pages
Researching
chapter 15|3 pages
Launching the Tyndall Centre
chapter 16|13 pages
The Tyndall Centre, interdisciplinary research and funding
chapter 17|4 pages
The appliance of science
chapter 18|9 pages
Geographical work at the boundaries of climate change
chapter 19|8 pages
Mapping climate change knowledge
part 4|31 pages
Culture
chapter 21|7 pages
Rainbows in the greenhouse
chapter 22|2 pages
On John Constable's Cloud Study (1822)
chapter 23|4 pages
Climate security: the new determinism
chapter 24|6 pages
A cultural history of climate
chapter 25|5 pages
Learning to live with re-created climates
chapter 26|3 pages
A town called Bygdaby
part 5|48 pages
Policy
chapter 27|2 pages
Whistling in the dark
chapter 28|3 pages
Choice is all
chapter 29|4 pages
Pie in the sky tops this G8's wish list
chapter 30|5 pages
A non-skeptical heresy: taking the science out of climate change
chapter 31|3 pages
The limits of the Stern Review for climate change policy-making
chapter 32|4 pages
Setting goals for global climate governance: an inter-disciplinary perspective
chapter 33|4 pages
Climate refugees: cause for a new agreement?
chapter 34|8 pages
Moving beyond climate change
chapter 35|5 pages
Climate intervention schemes could be undone by geopolitics
chapter 36|4 pages
On the ‘two degrees' climate policy target
part 6|22 pages
Communicating
chapter 37|3 pages
Chaotic world of climate truth
chapter 38|2 pages
Less heat, more light, please
chapter 39|4 pages
What was the Copenhagen climate change conference really about?
chapter 40|3 pages
Climate change: no Eden, no apocalypse
chapter 41|3 pages
Heated debate
chapter 42|3 pages
You've been framed
part 7|52 pages
Controversy
chapter 43|4 pages
Top British boffin: time to ditch the climate consensus
chapter 44|4 pages
‘Show your working': what Climategate means
chapter 45|3 pages
The science and politics of climate change
chapter 46|3 pages
A changing climate for the IPCC
chapter 47|12 pages
Climategate, scientific controversy and the politics of climate change
chapter 48|4 pages
The IPCC on trial: experimentation continues
chapter 49|3 pages
The year climate science was redefined
chapter 50|13 pages
After Climategate … never the same
part 8|21 pages
Controversy
chapter 51|3 pages
Forty ways to change a world climate
chapter 52|3 pages
Save the world without being an eco-bore
chapter 53|4 pages
Climate change: from issue to magnifier
chapter 54|4 pages
Amid the financial storm: re-directing climate change
chapter 55|3 pages
A bleak analysis
part 9|12 pages
Reactions to Why We Disagree About Climate Change