Weathered

Mike Hulme is professor of climate and culture in the Department of Geography at King’s College London.  His work sits at the intersection of climate, history and culture.  He studies how knowledge about climate and its changes is made and represented and analyses the numerous ways in which the idea of climate-change is deployed in public discourse around the world.  His previous books include Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering (Polity, 2014), Exploring Climate Change Through Science and In Society (Routledge, 2013) and Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge, 2009).  This latter book was chosen by The Economist magazine as one of its science and technology books of the year.  From 2000 to 2007 he was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, based at the University of East Anglia, and since 2007 has been the founding Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change. He is currently Head of Department.

Mike Hulme’s wise and well-crafted book encircles the idea of climate from a series of perspectives, showing its elusive nature from a welter of examples. As the argument develops, we see how climate is embedded in multiple cultures, histories, and knowledges about nature. We are shown how our views of climate depend on personal experiences, scientific models, inherited tropes, and political interest. Each chapter reflects a turn of the kaleidoscope, gradually making the reader see both the complexity and the singularity of each image. Hulme’s remarkable achievement is to humanise climate, without losing sight of the larger challenges; this is where the book cannot but affect the reader.

• What is Climate?Part 1: Knowledges of ClimateHistoricising ClimateKnowing ClimateChanging ClimatesPart 2: The Powers of ClimateLiving with ClimateBlaming ClimateFearing ClimateRepresenting ClimatePart 3: The Futures of ClimatePredicting ClimateRedesigning ClimateGoverning ClimateReading Future Climates