Exploring Climate Change in Science and Society: An Anthology of Mike Hulme's Writings, Speeches and Interviews: An Anthology of Mike Hulme's Essays, Interviews and Speeches

by Mike Hulme

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 Three substantive unpublished new essays have been specially written for the book, including one reflecting on the legacy of Climategate.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.

352 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Climate change has become a new medium through which human life is now lived.

The fascinating collected essays of a climate scientist who became a spokesperson for the integration of policy and humanistic considerations alongside the ever-less-clearly understood limitations of scientific reports on climate change. Hulme never cedes ground to climate change deniers, but nor does he champion an unsubstantiated version of "science" reducible to popular platitudes. Instead, Hulme convincingly argues for optimistic, socially-minded interventions to address fundamental questions of inequality, education, and climate change together, alongside a more rounded perception of scientific understandings of the world and its inhabitants. At the end, Hulme notes, we now use the idea of "climate change" to amplify many interrelated and complex concerns:

Climate change is a synecdoche for our confusion and anxiety about the goals, ambitions, and destinies we foresee for ourselves and our progeny, even before we worry about whether or not we can realize them.

The limitations of the collection are mostly clear, insofar that this is a somewhat dated set of essays not initially intended for publication together. However, Hulme has a good introduction, short reflections on each of his sections that unite various pieces (sections such as "Policy" or "Culture" or "Science"), and has included several previously unpublished pieces as well. It's good for historical understandings and to get a glimpse of Hulme's trajectory and intellectual project, even if the book does not make the most tightly packaged and coherent whole.