M Hulme
Biographic Data
| ID | 37469 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Hulme |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Hulme |
| SIGNATURE | HULME M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of East Anglia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1273-7662 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 98 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1576 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 98 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
The Historical Evolution of “Clean” Bodies and Air in European Cultures
Amid a sense of crisis, urgency, and political inaction pertaining to climate change, a narrative of “cleaning up” the global atmosphere is emerging in scientific, political, and public discourse. It conveys the need to stabilize the climate by achieving temperature targets and net‐zero carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions. The metaphor of “clean” is a central feature of this narrative, and it emphasizes technological interventions to reduce and remo…
Beyond science
In this autobiographical chapter, I reflect on why Geography matters for making sense of climate change. My focus is on how Geography enables different kinds of knowing to be brought into dialogue. I trace the various ways I have studied climate change through my career, and the related institutional pathways and motives that have enabled that journey to unfold. I started as an undergraduate geographer in the late 1970s, encountering climate thro…
Climate-induced redistribution of people is not inevitable
Climate-induced redistribution of people is not inevitable, Boas, Ingrid, Sterly, Harald, Farbotko, Carol, Hulme, Mike, Benveniste, Hélène, Schewel, Kerilyn D, Bettini, Giovanni, Borderon, Marion, Hoffmann, Roman, van der Geest, Kees, Durand-Delacre, David, Selby, Jan, Wrathall, David J, Baldwin, Andrew, Benítez Cortés, Ailín, Bukari, Kaderi N, Bunchuay-Peth, Simon, Capisani, Simona, Codjoe, Samuel Nii Ardey, Dahm, Ruben, Dewan, Camelia, Dijstelb…
David Livingstone’s The Empire of Climate
There is no human climate niche
Bring digital twins back to Earth
We reflect on the development of digital twins of the Earth, which we associate with a reductionist view of nature as a machine. The projects of digital twins deviate from contemporary scientific paradigms in the treatment of complexity and uncertainty, and does not engage with critical and interpretative social sciences. We contest the utility of digital twins for addressing climate change issues and discuss societal risks associated with the co…
Three institutional pathways to envision the future of the IPCC
Climate, cartography, and the life and death of the ‘natural region’ in British geography
During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, Oxford-based Scottish geographer Andrew Herbertson constructed a framework for comprehending and categorising climate and its interrelations: natural regions. Along with a large circle of students and collaborators, Herbertson promoted natural regions as the conceptual keystone for geographical teaching and research. This article shows how natural regions theory conceived of climate as an o…
Reflections on the afterlives of a PhD thesis
Most readers of this paper will likely have written a PhD thesis, will be in the throes of writing one, or perhaps will be aspiring to write one. There is a huge literature on the practice and experience of PhD research – on designing a thesis, on writing and research, on the student–supervisor relationship, on the doctoral student experience, and so on. In this paper, however, I reflect on a specific question less often asked: in what ways does …
Critical Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
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 influence. Discussing its internal workings and operating principles, it shows how IPCC assessments are…
Climate Change
Written by a leading geographer of climate, this book offers a unique guide to students and general readers alike for making sense of this profound, far-reaching, and contested idea. It presents climate change as an idea with a past, a present, and a future. In ten carefully crafted chapters, Climate Change offers a synoptic and inter-disciplinary understanding of the idea of climate change from its varied historical and cultural origins; to its …
Knowing like a global expert organization
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC )
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 drawn from around the world, operating under evolving protocols of knowledge assessment established…
Climate change forever
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 engineering problem, a new locus of politics or as a human predicament. The idea of climate change seems unl…
One Earth, Many Futures, No Destination
Social scientific knowledge in times of crisis
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)? And, subsequently, what forms of knowledge are deemed legitimate and authoritative for informing interventions? As we see in the current pandemic, there is a desire for immediate answers and solutions during periods of uncertainty.…
The Tyranny of Distance
There is a growing sense that US military effectiveness has been on the wane in recent years. Is this the case? If so, what are the reasons for the decay in American combat performance? We first examine the available systematic evidence for American military decline, showing that the United States has indeed experienced a drop in the quality of outcomes of its military contests. Observers have offered a number of explanations for declining Americ…
The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare
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 lived, while Volume 2, The World's Shakespeare, 1660–Present, examines what the world has made of Shak…
Climate migration myths
Telling one story, or many? An ecolinguistic analysis of climate change stories in UK national newspaper editorials
“Gaps” in Climate Change Knowledge
Geoengineering at the “Edge of the World”
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 Corporation's attempts to align its public brand with the Haida name and proud identity of enviro…
Climate Change, Concept of
Like all powerful ideas, climate change can be deceptively simple to define and yet subject to a multiplicity of cultural meanings and technical interpretations. Most cultures have evolved mythological accounts to explain the vicissitudes of climate, while the newly quantitative climatologists from the nineteenth century onwards developed various statistical definitions of climatic change. But since the 1980s, and emerging out of Western scientif…
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC )
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 larger number of special reports. These reports are produced by independent experts drawn from around the world, operating under evolving protocols of knowledge assessment established by t…
Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)? An editorial
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: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash]. This editorial introduces a WIREs Climate Change Special Coll…
Who speaks for the future of Earth? How critical social science can extend the conversation on the Anthropocene
Geographical work at the boundaries of climate change
Adaptation to climate change in the developing world
The world’s climate is changing and will continue to change into the coming century at rates projected to be unprecedented in recent human history. The risks associated with these changes are real but highly uncertain. Societal vulnerability to the risks associated with climate change may exacerbate ongoing social and economic challenges, particularly for those parts of societies dependent on resources that are sensitive to changes in climate. Ri…
Problems with making and governing global kinds of knowledge☆
Epistemic geographies of climate change
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 material cultures of knowledge-making, and by the often messy processes of linking scientific knowledg…
The conquering of climate
We are living in a climate of fear about our future climate. The language of the public discourse around global warming routinely uses a repertoire which includes words such as 'catastrophe', 'terror', 'danger', 'extinction' and 'collapse'. To help make sense of this phenomenon the story of the complex relationships between climates and cultures in different times and in different places is in urgent need of telling. If we can understand from the…
Reducing the Future to Climate
This article traces how climate has moved from playing a deterministic to a reductionist role in discourses about environment, society, and the future. Climate determinism previously offered an explanation, and hence a justification, for the superiority of certain imperial races and cultures. The argument put forward here is that the new climate reductionism is driven by the hegemony exercised by the predictive natural sciences over contingent, i…
Cosmopolitan Climates
This essay argues for the fruitfulness of Beck's idea of cosmopolitanism for understanding the changing political, sociological and psychological attributes of climate change. This argument is illustrated through brief examinations of how climate change is contributing to the dissolution of three modern dualisms: nature-culture (ontology), present-future (epistemology) and global-local (geography). Not only does the cosmopolitan perspective help …
Unstable climates
Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited
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 contributory factor in the extreme drought experienced within Syria prior to its civil war; this drought in…
Climate and its changes
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 concerned with the idea of climate change , I believe there is important work still to be done on enrichin…
Knowing like a global expert organization
Framing global biodiversity
An iconic approach for representing climate change
Climatic perspectives on Sahelian desiccation
Model migrations
The Hadley Centre’s PRECIS regional climate modelling system has been designed to fulfil the informational requirements of adaptation and development planners in the ‘global south’. Drawing on recent insights from science and technology studies and the geography of science concerning the mobility of scientific knowledge, this study investigates the institutional and discursive associations that enable the PRECIS modelling system to move between i…
Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)? An editorial
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: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash]. This editorial introduces a WIREs Climate Change Special Coll…
Assessing the robustness of adaptation decisions to climate change uncertainties
A co-evolutionary approach to climate change impact assessment
Negotiating future climates for public policy
Understanding and managing climate change
Climate change has emerged over the last 25 years not just as a physical reality, affecting global and regional climates, but also as a socio-cultural phenomenon - an icon of a globalizing world which is increasingly altering the physical fabric of our planet and at the same time demanding new forms of global governance. The UK, both through its scientific research activity and through its development of climate change policy initiatives, has bee…
Communicating Climate Knowledge
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 Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five i…
What does policy-relevant global environmental knowledge do? The cases of climate and biodiversity
The emergence of the geoengineering debate in theUKprint media
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 theUKnational press as a domain in which to begin intercepting discourses of geoengineering forming within theUK. Frame analysis is conducted and the issue frames of Innovation, Risk, Governance and Accountability, Economics, Morality, Security and Justi…
Social scientific knowledge in times of crisis
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)? And, subsequently, what forms of knowledge are deemed legitimate and authoritative for informing interventions? As we see in the current pandemic, there is a desire for immediate answers and solutions during periods of uncertainty.…
Recent Rainfall Changes in Central Sudan and Their Physical and Human Implications
This paper examines rainfall changes and their physical and human implications in the critical 'desertification zone' between latitudes 12'N and 160N of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan. Three aspects of rainfall change are examined: changes in annual rainfall (the primary parameter), changes in daily rainfall magnitude-frequency, and rainfall localization (secondary parameters). Graphical and statistical analyses of 26 long-term annual rainf…
Rainfall in Central Sudan
Recent Rainfall Changes and Their Impact on Hydrology and Water Supply in the Semi- Arid Zone of the Sudan
1980s, with 1984 the driest year on record and all annual rainfalls from 1980 to 1987 well below the long-term mean. In White Nile Province annual rainfall in 1965-84 was 40 per cent below 1920-39 levels; wet season length has contracted by 39-51 per cent; and the frequencies of both large and minor daily rainfalls have declined by up to 51 per cent. Hydrological consequences in North West White Nile have included reduced frequencies of wadi flow…
The Changing Rainfall Resources of Sudan
Rainfall is one of the key resources of Sudan. This requires detailed measurement and monitoring of rainfall availability to enable its effective management. The changing nature of rainfall supply in Sudan during the twentieth century is examined using historical annual, monthly and daily data back to 1900. Rainfall depletion has been most severe in semi-arid central Sudan where between 1921-50 and 1956-85 annual rainfall has declined by 15 per c…
The Application of Seasonal Rainfall Forecasts for Africa Workshop held at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, 19 January 1990
Environment and Climate Change
Seasonal rainfall forecasting for Africa
An experimental seasonal rainfall forecast for the African Sahel as a whole has been issued by the UK Met. Office for each year since 1986. The forecast is issued in the May or June preceding the wet season (mainly the months July to September). Currently, this forecast is communicated directly to National Met. Agencies in the African Sahel who make various uses of it. For the experimental forecast to become operational, several questions need to…
Seasonal rainfall forecasting for Africa part II—application and impact assessment
An experimental seasonal rainfall forecast for the African Sahel as a whole has been issued by the UK Meteorological Office for each year since 1986. The scientific aspects of the forecast, including its current and possible future status, have been discussed in Part I of this paper. Here, we examine how the forecast might be applied, and assess the impacts it may have on potential users in Africa. Five groups of users of the rainfall forecasts a…
International Conference on the Physical Causes of Drought and Desertification, University of Melbourne, 9–13 December, 1991
Future Climate Change and Land Use in the United Kingdom
A consensus of scientific opinion believes that the next few decades will see further rises in global-mean surface air temperature owing to the increasing global concentration of radiatively active greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This paper outlines the climatic implications for the UK of global warming in terms of the rate of change, the effect on regional climate and the frequency and severity of some extreme weather events. The expected as…
Climate change implications for Europe☆An application of the Escape model
Using Climate Information in Africa
Quantitative records of climate in Africa derived from dedicated measuring instruments commenced in the middle decades of the 19th century and became widespread in the first decades of the present century (Figure As with many colonial institutions, newly established National Meteorological Agencies collated and processed such environmental data partly out of a desire for abstract knowledge (how wet or hot were these new colonies compared with the…
The global greenhouse regime
What is a dangerous climate change
Buenos Aires and Kyoto targets do little to reduce climate change impacts
Climate change scenarios for global impacts studies
Climates of the British Isles
A co-evolutionary approach to climate change impact assessment
African climate change
This paper reviews observed and possible future (2000-2100) continentwide changes in temperature and rainfall for Africa. For the historic period we draw upon a new observed global climate data set which allows us to explore aspects of regional climate change related to diurnal temperature range and rainfall variability. The latter includes an investigation of regions where seasonal rainfall is sensitive to El Nio climate variability. This review…
Climatic perspectives on Sahelian desiccation
A high-resolution data set of surface climate over global land areas
We describe the construction of a 10' latitude/longitude data set of mean monthly surface climate over global land areas, excluding Antarctica. The climatology includes 8 climate elements -precipitation, wet-day frequency, temperature, diurnal temperature range, relative humidity, sunshine duration, ground frost frequency and windspeed -and was interpolated from a data set of station means for the period centred on 1961 to 1990. Precipitation was…
Climate data for political areas
Adaptation to climate change in the developing world
The world’s climate is changing and will continue to change into the coming century at rates projected to be unprecedented in recent human history. The risks associated with these changes are real but highly uncertain. Societal vulnerability to the risks associated with climate change may exacerbate ongoing social and economic challenges, particularly for those parts of societies dependent on resources that are sensitive to changes in climate. Ri…
Does climate adaptation policy need probabilities?
Estimating the likelihood of future climate change has become a priority objective within the research community. This is the case because of the advancement of science, because of user demand and because of the central role played by climate prediction in guiding adaptation policy. But are probabilities what climate policy really needs? This article reviews three key questions: (1) Why might we (not) need probabilities of climate change? (2) Wha…
Understanding and managing climate change
Climate change has emerged over the last 25 years not just as a physical reality, affecting global and regional climates, but also as a socio-cultural phenomenon - an icon of a globalizing world which is increasingly altering the physical fabric of our planet and at the same time demanding new forms of global governance. The UK, both through its scientific research activity and through its development of climate change policy initiatives, has bee…
Climate change (65 works) · Political science (53 works) · Ecology (41 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (38 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Geography (35 works) · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance (35 works) · Environmental Science (30 works) · Economics (28 works) · Law (28 works)