Mike Hulme

Early life and education

Mike Hulme attended Madras College secondary school from 1974 to 1978. 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 1986. His doctoral thesis was titled, Secular Climatic and Hydrological Change in Central Sudan. His research career is summarised here.

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. Hulme served on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) from 1995 to 2001. He also contributed to the reports of the IPCC, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

He is the founding Editor-in-Chief (since 2008) of the review journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change, published by John Wiley & Sons.

Publications

He is the author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change 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. He has also edited the books Climates of the British Isles: Present, Past and Future, "Climate policy options post-2012: European strategy, technology and adaptation after Kyoto" co-edited with Bert Metz and Michael Grubb 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.

Views about climate change

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

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.

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

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. The authors argued that, after what they regard as the failure of the 2009 Copennhagen Climate Summit, the Kyoto Protocol crashed. They claimed that Kyoto had "failed to produce any discernable [sic] real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years." 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.

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.