Climate Change (Key Ideas in Geography)

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 construction more recently through scientific endeavour; to the multiple ways in which political, social, and cultural movements in today’s world seek to make sense of and act upon it; to the possible futures of climate, however it may be governed and imagined. The central claim of the book is that the full breadth and power of the idea of climate change can only be grasped from a vantage point that embraces the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. This vantage point is what the book offers, written from the perspective of a geographer whose career work on climate change has drawn across the full range of academic disciplines. The book highlights the work of leading geographers in relation to climate change; examples, illustrations, and case study boxes are drawn from different cultures around the world, and questions are posed for use in class discussions.

The book is written as a student text, suitable for disciplinary and inter-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate courses that embrace climate change from within social science and humanities disciplines. Science students studying climate change on inter-disciplinary programmes will also benefit from reading it, as too will the general reader looking for a fresh and distinctive account of climate change.

Mike Hulme is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Fellow of Pembroke College. The focus of his research career has been the analysis and explanation of the idea of climate change and his work has been published extensively across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. He is the author of nine books on climate change, including Contemporary Climate Change Debates: A Student Primer (Routledge, 2020). From 2000 to 2007 he was Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, based at the University of East Anglia.