I have been interested in climate change and climate change communication for a long time, most recently as part of a Leverhulme Trust funded ‘Making Science Public’ programme of research (2012-2018). As part of this programme, we established a blog: the ‘Making Science Public’ blog. Since then, I have been blogging about climate change language and politics, climate change communication and culture, extreme weather and extreme weather communication and more. Global warming has turned to global heating and global boiling, something we all felt during the heatwaves and wildfires of 2026.
In this anthology I trace some of the developments leading up to this point. I hope this is a useful summary of what has sometimes been called ‘climate linguistics’, focusing on issues of metaphor use in climate communication. The anthology has five sections and a brief Outlook:
- Climate language, metaphors and framing
- Extreme weather, fire and floods
- Climate politics, scepticism and denial
- Climate communication and public engagement
- Climate, culture and society
If you want to read this as a navigable webpage you can do so here.
1. Climate Language, Metaphors and Framing
I have been interested in the language used to talk about climate change for a very long time and I have always been fascinated by metaphors, that is, the linguistic and cognitive instruments we use to make something unfamiliar or unprecedented familiar and to provoke action or indeed inaction on climate change. The following posts trace some of the changes in the linguistic framing of climate change and climate science. I’ll first summarise posts dealing more generally with language and metaphor; I then look at some specific terms and concepts; and finally, I come to metaphors used to talk about the contested field of ‘geoengineering’.
General
Languages of uncertainty (2012)
This is an early and foundational post, written as part of a climate scepticism project, asking what ‘uncertainty’ means to ordinary people, and how that everyday meaning clashes with the technical uncertainty language of climate science. Drawing on corpus linguistics, I found that ‘uncertainty’ carries strongly negative connotations in common usage (confusion, doubt, anxiety) and argued that translating scientific uncertainty into accessible language requires more than swapping terms for visuals or probability phrases. The post was written in the aftermath of Climategate, when scientists were exhorted to be more open about uncertainties on the one hand, while on the other being accused of being high priests of climate religion when expressing certainty. It makes the case that linguists need a seat at the table. (Research published in 2026 seems to show that honesty about uncertainty builds trust)
Abseiling down the climate cliff metaphor (2012)
The ‘climate cliff’ metaphor emerged during climate talks at COP18 in Doha in the context of the US fiscal cliff debates in late 2012. The metaphor spread rapidly via Twitter and online media. The post explores how this new metaphor differs from older, slow-circulating ones like ‘greenhouse effect’: it was web-native, fast-born, and embedded in richly embodied journey-schema language — hurtling towards, falling off, peering over. This was an early reflection on how digital media was changing the speed, spread, and political connectivity of climate metaphors.
Climate linguistics (2015)
Prompted by being named a ‘climate linguist’ in a news article, I asked in this post whether the field of climate linguistics actually exists, of which I seemed to be the sole member. The post maps out what such a field might encompass: corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, metaphor studies, ecolinguistics, and social representations theory. I was of course not the sole member of the field. There are many friends and colleagues, such as Nelya Koteyko, Iina Hellsten, Rusi Jaspal, and Luke Collins whose joint labour contributed to founding this new field of study.
Climate change metaphors: Crimes, detectives and fingerprints (2018)
This post investigates the forensic metaphor cluster running through climate science communication: fingerprints, attribution, evidence, detection. Tracing the ‘fingerprint’ metaphor from scientific articles in the early 1990s through to media coverage around the 2018 IPCC special report, the post shows how the same metaphor operates differently in scientific and journalistic contexts, and how it has been used both to assert and to challenge scientific credibility. This resonates with the present moment when climate attribution science is maturing while the legitimacy of expertise is under sustained political attack.
IPCC reports, climate change and language work (2021)
Written in September 2021 while I was still dealing with the aftermath of catastrophic flooding in my German hometown, this post examines what I call the ‘language work’ embedded in IPCC reports: the calibration of uncertainty language (coming back to a topic I tackled in an early 2012 post, see above), the shift towards more forceful and plain expression, and the negotiations through which scientists decide how confidently to speak. The post closes with a reflection on the role linguistics might play in future report-writing.
Climate change and language change (2022)
Written while monitoring wildfires threatening relatives in New Mexico, this post revisits a decade of work on ‘carbon compounds’ alongside an expanding vocabulary of extreme weather words, such as weather bombs, atmospheric rivers, rain bombs, heat dome, wet bulb, flash drought. It tracks how the language of climate change has escalated from ‘change’ towards ‘chaos’ and reflects on how neologisms born of lived emergency are now accumulating faster than anyone can map them. Extreme weather seems to call for more extreme language.
The climate speaks in words and pictures: Is anybody listening? (2023)
A data-driven exploration of when climate-related terms, such as global warming, climate change, climate crisis, heatwave, extreme weather, first appeared in news coverage and when they began to accelerate, using Nexis data. Written during the heatwave of 2023, the post traces a long arc from the 1970s to the present, noting how danger has colonised colour palettes once associated with hope and romance, with oranges and purples now signalling catastrophe rather than sunsets. The post ends on a melancholy question: the climate has been speaking in ever louder words and images for decades; is anyone listening?
Climate change, metaphors and me (2023)
A personal and playful end-of-year piece prompted by a dinner table moment: the author’s son asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph about metaphor and climate change in the style of Brigitte Nerlich, and the result — dripping in metaphors of scaffolding, tapestries, architects and mirrors — was both astonishing and instructive. The post uses this to reflect on two decades of climate metaphor research and on what it means for an AI to have absorbed and reproduced a scholarly style.
Compound weather: Some linguistic musings (2025)
A reflection on ‘compound weather’ rather than compound weather words. This refers to simultaneous or overlapping extreme weather events, raising awareness of complex climate-weather interactions. Drawing on earlier work on ‘carbon compounds’ with Nelya Koteyko, the post asks whether neologisms can speed up social change and public awareness. The answer, as ever, is somewhere in between: naming something is necessary but not sufficient for acting on it.
Carbon bombs: On climate change and lexical change (2025)
This post returns yet again to the long-running research thread on ‘carbon compounds’ to examine a newer, more explosive addition: ‘carbon bomb’, used to describe massive fossil fuel extraction projects whose emissions would blow through Paris Agreement targets. The post traces the term from around 2015 onwards, examines the entailments of the bomb metaphor (urgency, catastrophe, the possibility of defusal) and reflects on what it tells us about the emotional temperature of climate discourse in 2025.
Can better words lead to better climate action? (2025)
This links to an article in the magazine Atmos during which I was interviewed about climate language and climate action. Drawing on close to two decades of research, I discuss how metaphors scaffold understanding and reflect responsibility; why familiarity matters alongside urgency; and what newer terms like ‘climate whiplash’ and ‘global weirding’ add to the discourse.
Terms and concepts; science and politics
Adaptation (2014)
This post provides a close look at ‘adaptation’ as one of the three great concepts — alongside mitigation and geoengineering — that structure policy responses to climate change. The post traces how ‘adaptation’ rose to prominence in public debate around the time of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report and the 2014 UK winter floods, examines the conceptual history of the term, and asks what it means in practice for communities and ecosystems. Part of a broader inquiry into the vocabulary of climate policy and its often-unexamined assumptions.
El Niño: The Christ Child (2015)
In this post I explore a seasonal curiosity prompted by seeing daffodils blooming in December 2015 and experiencing an unseasonably mild UK winter: where does the name ‘El Niño’ come from, and what does its religious etymology tell us about how weather phenomena get named and culturally embedded? Tracing the term from 19th-century Peruvian fishermen who named the warm Christmas current after the Christ Child, through to its global scientific meaning today, the post illuminates how names carry cultural history far beyond their technical referents.
Carbon pollution (2015)
Written in the wake of (then) President Obama’s Clean Power Plan announcement, this post examines ‘carbon pollution’ as the latest addition to the family of ‘carbon compounds’ — the carbon footprints, carbon diets, carbon indulgences and carbon sinners tracked in earlier research with Nelya Koteyko. The post traces the term back to 1989 and asks whether Obama’s rhetorical intervention would shift the lexical landscape or whether, a quarter of a century on from the first climate warnings, the same patterns of talk without action would simply repeat themselves. After a change in American president, it mainly did.
The pause (2015)
An examination of ‘the pause’ (the alleged slowdown in global surface temperature rise between roughly 1998 and 2015) as a linguistic and political phenomenon as much as a scientific one. Written with Mike Hulme and Warren Pearce, the post explores how this contested term became a weapon in the armoury of climate sceptics and a source of genuine difficulty for scientists trying to communicate uncertainty honestly. A case study in how a single word can simultaneously describe a real scientific debate and be weaponised to delay climate action.
Groundhog day in the hothouse (2018)
Prompted by the explosion of media coverage around Will Steffen et al.’s ‘Hothouse Earth’ paper in August 2018, this post traces the architectural metaphor family (icehouse, greenhouse, hothouse) through the history of climate science. Searching news archives, it finds that ‘hothouse earth’ was already being used in 1990 following John Gribbin’s book of the same name, and that the issues raised then were identical to those raised now. The title says it all: the same arguments, the same warnings, the same failures to act, cycling endlessly.
Tipping point (2022)
This post presents a conceptual and metaphorical history of the concept of ‘tipping point’ in climate discourse, tracing the term from its origins in complexity theory and social science through to its status as one of the most politically charged concepts in climate communication. The post follows the term from Malcolm Gladwell’s popularisation through Tim Lenton’s 2008 scientific article to the 2022 McKay et al. update identifying up to fifteen active tipping elements. Along the way it unpacks the visual and physical metaphors attached to the concept (leaning chairs, seesaws, fuses, snapping elastic bands) and asks what they reveal about how we imagine catastrophe.
The concept of net zero hangs in the balance (2021)
Written during COP26, this post examines ‘net zero’ as a concept that has shifted, in just a few years, from a hopeful framework for climate ambition to a term viewed with deep suspicion as a cover for delay. Tracing the phrase from its first appearances in news coverage at the end of the 1990s through its IPCC SR15 formalisation in 2018 to its contested status in 2021, the post asks how a concept can flip so readily between positive and negative associations and what that instability tells us about the politics of climate language. Looking back at this post from 2026, it is clear that this ‘pejoration’ and polarisation of the term has deepened over time.
Global boiling (2023)
This post is a rapid response to UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s declaration in July 2023 that the era of ‘global warming’ was over and the era of ‘global boiling’ had begun. The post examines the rhetorical force of this escalation from warming to boiling and asks how it differs from earlier intensifications (‘climate crisis’, ‘climate emergency’, ‘climate breakdown’), and reflects on whether such verbal escalation can still shock a public that has been living through increasingly alarming language for decades.
Heat dome: Atmosphere, architecture and agency (2025)
This post is a metaphorical excavation of ‘heat dome’, tracing architectural metaphors of the atmosphere from a 19th-century engraving of someone piercing the vault of the sky, through ‘greenhouse’, ‘blanket’ and ‘dome’, to current scientific and media usage. The post explores how spatial and structural metaphors shape what we think the atmosphere can do (enclosing, trapping, sheltering) and who or what has agency over it.
Geoengineering and metaphor
Mitigation, adaptation, geoengineering: Patterns of discourse, patterns of mystery (2013)
This is one of the first posts in the blog’s sustained engagement with geoengineering. It uses Nexis data to track how the three great policy concepts (mitigation, adaptation, and geoengineering) have featured in news coverage since 1988. The findings are surprising: adaptation dominated from the very beginning, mitigation rose exponentially after 2006, and geoengineering barely registered. The post raises the question of why one contested and speculative set of technologies receives so little public attention and what that silence might mean for democratic deliberation about planetary-scale intervention.
Geoengineering and the (un)making of the world we want to live in (2013)
Based on research with Rusi Jaspal this post analyses geoengineering coverage in trade magazines and UK newspapers between 1980 and 2013. It examines the metaphorical frames through which geoengineering has been presented to the public. Three master metaphors dominate: the planet as a machine to be fixed, the planet as a patient to be healed, and geoengineering as a weapon in a war against climate change. Drawing on I. A. Richards and Suzanne Romaine, we argue that the metaphors we use for geoengineering are not neutral; they shape the world we will or will not choose to make.
Geoengineering metaphors: 2011 and 2021 (2021)
This is a decade-on revisit of 2011–12 research on geoengineering metaphors, asking what has changed and what has stubbornly persisted. The planet-as-machine, planet-as-patient, and war metaphors are still in circulation; but new voices and new urgencies have entered the debate, including a solar geoengineer quoted comparing the intervention to chemotherapy arguing that you would never poison yourself if healthy, but when sick and out of options, perhaps you must. The post ends on an unsettled question: can one really call geoengineering a ‘solution’, and is the repetition of the same metaphorical debates year after year getting us anywhere?
Geoengineering and metaphors, 2009 to 2025: Continuity and change (2025)
This is the most comprehensive of the geoengineering metaphor posts, written in the wake of the UK government’s 2024/25 announcement of £56.8 million in ARIA-administered funding for geoengineering research. Spanning sixteen years of coverage and three major UK inflection points (the 2009 Royal Society report, the 2013 abandoned SPICE project, and the 2025 funding announcement) it traces both what has changed (more urgency, more commercial interest, more political controversy) and what has not (the same machine, medical and war metaphors recycling through each new debate).
Don’t bang your head on the guardrails: Geoengineering metaphors 2026 (2026)
The most recent instalment in the long-running geoengineering series, prompted by a Bluesky comment pointing to Guardian opinion pieces on the subject. The post homes in on ‘guardrails’ (the term used to describe governance frameworks for geoengineering research) and examines what this safety metaphor does: its implicit assumptions about control, risk management and the orderly navigation of dangerous territory. Written at a moment when solar radiation management is moving from speculation to funded research and contested governance, it asks whether the metaphors we use for controlling geoengineering are adequate to the scale of what is being contemplated.
2. Extreme Weather, Fire and Floods
Extreme weather has been a recurring preoccupation of this blog since its earliest days — not only because the events themselves have become more frequent and more devastating, but because the language used to describe them has evolved dramatically. From the early posts tracking ‘extreme weather’ as a rising phrase in news media, through the personal and the political, to the metaphor-rich coverage of California wildfires and Valencia floods, this section traces both the events and the words we have used to describe them.
Making weather personal (2014)
An early and prescient post prompted by a single word — ‘truculent’ — used in an Observer article to describe Scottish island weather. From this linguistic starting point, the post asks whether extreme weather is becoming personified in new ways, examining the ‘weather on steroids’ metaphor that emerged during Hurricane Sandy and the question of whether individual weather events can begin to embody climate change itself. An invitation to observe the emerging metaphors of weather as barometers of changing public perception.
Extreme weather events, climate change and the media (2013)
This is a first in a long series of posts tracking ‘extreme weather’ as a phrase in newspaper coverage, using Nexis data to show that unlike climate change discourse (which peaked around 2007 and declined), extreme weather talk was on a steady upward trajectory. The post asks whether talking about extreme weather was becoming a surrogate way of talking about climate change and whether the phrase ‘the new normal’ might be doing work that ‘climate change’ itself could no longer do in a polarised public sphere.
Extreme weather talk: Making climate public? (2013)
A follow-up post using Nexis data and Google Insights to show that media talk about extreme weather continued to rise even as climate change coverage fluctuated. Written after a Met Office press conference at which the climatologist Sir Brian Hoskins said ‘quite honestly we don’t know’ what caused recent strange weather patterns, the post asks what it means for public understanding when scientists hedge and the media amplifies. A methodological as much as a substantive post, demonstrating how digital newspaper databases can serve as real-time monitors of public discourse.
Extreme weather talk: The sequel (2015)
Two years on from the original extreme weather talk post, this update revisits the Nexis graphs during a summer of heatwaves in India and Alaska, drought in California, and floods in Texas. The upward trend continues unabated. The post ends with a prediction — that extreme weather talk and climate change talk are slowly converging — with a note added two years later confirming that attribution science had indeed moved in that direction.
Extreme weather talk: The sequel to the sequel (2019)
This is the third post in the extreme weather talk series, written six years after the original, revisiting the Nexis data one more time. By 2019 the convergence of extreme weather and climate change discourse was clearly underway, and attribution science had given journalists new tools for linking specific events to background warming. A post that doubles as a longitudinal study — six years of watching language catch up with reality.
When climate change hits home: A personal story (2021)
This post was written in July 2021 after catastrophic flooding in Western Europe, including my home village near the Eifel. The post steps back from corpus analysis and Nexis graphs to write about grief, disbelief, and the gap between knowing intellectually that climate change is happening and experiencing its consequences in places you love.
The sky is falling and the trees are crying: Reflections on extreme weather (2022)
This is a wide-ranging post written while monitoring wildfires in New Mexico threatening relatives which examines the expanding vocabulary of extreme weather: rain bombs, atmospheric rivers, heat domes, wet bulb temperatures. The memorable title comes from two sources: the Chicken Little idiom (‘the sky is falling’) and a phrase from a community elder at a New Mexico fire meeting — ‘the trees are crying’ — which the post uses to argue that those who won’t listen to scientists might consider listening to the elders and the trees.
Wildfires and wild liars (2025)
Written in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic January 2025 Southern California urban wildfires, this post weaves together two threads: the growing body of scientific and literary work on the Pyrocene (the age of fire), and the simultaneous firestorm of disinformation and conspiracy theories that surrounded the disaster. Drawing on Payne, Zask, and Vaillant, it argues that the danger comes not only from mismanaging fire but from the rise of ‘homo mendacem’ or lying man whose wildfires of lies make organised response to extreme events ever harder.
Whiplash, sponges and blizzards of embers: Exploring wildfire metaphors (2025)
A detailed analysis of the metaphors used by climate scientist Daniel Swain to explain the California wildfires to a wide audience: climate whiplash (the oscillation between wet and dry extremes that primes vegetation to burn), the sponge (landscapes that absorb then release moisture), the atmospheric blow-dryer (the Santa Ana winds), and the ‘blizzard of a billion embers’ that swept through Los Angeles neighbourhoods. Drawing on Matlock, Coe and Westerling’s work on monster wildfire metaphors, the post argues that the best explanatory metaphors do two things at once: explain something complex and create a visceral feeling.
Fire, wind and lies: How we talk about wildfire shapes how we respond (2026)
A blog post introducing and summarising a peer-reviewed article by Nerlich and Jaspal published in Metaphor and the Social World (2026) and analysing the metaphorical framing of the January 2025 Southern California wildfires. The article identifies two types of metaphorical mapping: one structuring how wildfire itself is described (through conventional, situation-specific and climate-informed metaphors), and one structuring how disinformation about the fires spread (through fire metaphors applied to lies and rumour). A demonstration that wildfire metaphors work in two directions at once.
Mud monsters and solidarity: Social representations of the 2024 Valencia floods (2026)
This post is based on research with Rusi Jaspal in which we compare social representations of the 2024 Valencia floods and the 2021 German floods. We examine how communities make meaning during and after catastrophic flood events. The Valencia floods, which killed over 220 people in October 2024, generated both a torrent of monster-and-force metaphors to describe the floodwaters and an extraordinary wave of solidarity as thousands of volunteers converged on the mud-filled villages. The post asks what the contrast between destructive force and constructive community tells us about how societies respond to extreme weather.
Cancelled due to extreme heat (2026)
My latest post on climate change before compiling this anthology was a bit of a witty and ironic one, telling the tale of the 2026 heatwaves during which events that were supposed to be about organising climate resilience and talking about the climate emergency were cancelled due to extreme weather.
3. Climate Politics, Scepticism and Denial
Climate politics has been a persistent thread through the blog since 2012, from the aftermath of Climategate in 2009 through the scepticism wars of the mid-2010s to the more recent contestation of ‘net zero’ and the rise of disinformation. The posts in this section trace the rhetorical strategies of those who have sought to slow, dilute, or reverse climate action and the linguistic tools that have been used both to attack and to defend climate science.
Scepticism: Process not position (2012)
2012 was the start of our Making Science Public programme of research with climate scepticism being on sub-project. One of the first posts I wrote was inspired by looking at the concept of ‘scepticism’ through the lens of what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called ‘active scepticism’, one “which constantly aims at overcoming itself, and arriving by means of regulated experience at a kind of conditioned certainty”. This type of scepticism is diametrically opposed to the facile type of scepticism that rejects all evidence that doesn’t suit certain biases.
Anchoring doubt (2015)
I returned to this topic five years later when I looked at the concept of ‘doubt’ through the lens of Bertrand Russell who wrote”: “The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment. These propositions may seem mild, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionize human life.”
Moderation impossible? Climate change, alarmism and rhetorical entrenchment (2013)
This post is a historical survey of the word ‘alarmist’ in climate discourse, tracing its use from 1980 to 2013 in newspaper archives. Findings show that alarmist rhetoric and counter-rhetoric have been structurally entrenched in the climate debate since James Hansen’s 1989 Washington Post piece and Patrick Michaels’ response to it. Written at a moment when calls for more respectful, moderated debate were being made, it asks, with some scepticism, whether the deep rhetorical trenches of the climate wars can really be dismantled by an appeal to civility.
Weather 1, Climategate 0 (2013)
Written in the winter of 2012-13, when extreme weather (floods, storms, record temperatures) dominated UK news coverage, this post argues that lived experience of unusual weather was beginning to outweigh the political damage of Climategate. Tracking public attention to Climategate against attention to extreme weather using Nexis data, it finds that the ‘weather frame’ was winning the public mind, even if the political and media battles over climate science remained unresolved.
Tracking fluctuations in climate change debates (2014)
This is a methodological post using Nexis data to visualise how public debate about climate change has ebbed and flowed since the late 1980s, with particular attention to the spikes associated with major IPCC reports, extreme weather events, and political controversies like Climategate. The post argues for treating news coverage as a longitudinal dataset for tracking the social life of scientific ideas and maps the key moments when climate change moved up or down the public agenda.
Climate scepticism in Australia (2015)
A post reflecting on the distinctive character of Australian climate scepticism, prompted by the Abbott government’s repeal of the carbon tax in 2014. Drawing on research into the structural features of climate doubt, the post examines why Australia became an outlier in Anglophone climate politics and what it reveals about the relationship between fossil fuel interests, political culture, and the media ecosystem. This is a reminder that climate scepticism is not uniform but takes nationally specific forms.
Lukewarmers (2015)
This post examines ‘lukewarmers’ — those who accept some human influence on climate but dispute the severity of projected impacts — as a distinct and strategically important position in the climate debate. The post examines the rhetorical function of lukewarmism: it allows its adherents to claim scientific credibility while resisting the policy implications of mainstream climate science. This shows how positions just inside the edge of scientific plausibility can be more effective at slowing action than outright denial.
Climate wars (2015)
A post prompted by a summer of intense online conflict over climate communication and the meaning of scientific consensus, examining the military metaphors (wars, battles, fronts, campaigns) that pervade climate politics. The post asks what these belligerent framings do to the possibility of productive public debate, and whether the metaphor of war is ultimately self-defeating for those trying to build broad coalitions for climate action.
Climate, science and politics: The certainty and consensus confusion (2016)
There is a sometimes genuine, sometimes manufactured confusion between scientific certainty and scientific consensus in climate discourse. The post traces how ‘consensus’ became a contested term, with critics claiming that appeals to consensus were a form of social pressure rather than scientific argument, while defenders argued that consensus accurately described the state of expert opinion and can be used to inspire climate action. A post that illuminates the rhetorical battlefield over the very language of scientific authority.
Tracing the contours of the consensus debate in climate change: The sequel (2017)
A follow-up to earlier work on climate consensus, this post revisits the debate in the light of new research and the changing political landscape of 2017, the year of Trump’s Paris withdrawal. It examines how the consensus framing had evolved and what new arguments had entered the debate about whether emphasising consensus helped or hindered public engagement with climate science.
Climate alarmism and climate realism (2017)
Returning to the ‘alarmism’ thread from 2013, this post examines the rise of ‘climate realism’ as a counter-frame, promoted by those who claimed that alarmist messaging was counterproductive and that a more ‘realistic’ assessment of climate risk — typically one that minimised urgency — was needed. The post analyses the rhetorical move of claiming the ‘realist’ label and asks who gets to define what is realistic in climate communication.
Are we all alarmists now? (2018)
Written during the summer of 2018, which was a summer of record heatwaves, wildfires, and drought across the Northern Hemisphere, this post asks whether the term ‘alarmism’ has finally lost its sting. When the climate is producing conditions that scientists had warned about for decades, is expressing alarm still a rhetorical excess or simply a rational response? A post that marks a turning point in my own relationship with the alarmism debate.
Climategate: Some reflections (2019)
Written on the tenth anniversary of Climategate — the leak of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November 2009 — this post looks back at its long shadow. It examines what Climategate actually showed, what it was claimed to show, and how it was used as a rhetorical resource by climate sceptics for years afterwards. A sober retrospective on one of the most significant episodes in the modern history of climate science communication.
Seeding clouds – seeding doubts (2024)
A post on the controversy surrounding cloud seeding and weather modification in 2024, particularly in the wake of the Dubai floods and claims that cloud seeding had caused or exacerbated them. The post examines how a real and contested technology became a vehicle for climate scepticism and conspiracy thinking, asking what happens when legitimate scientific uncertainty about geoengineering techniques gets weaponised in the political war over climate responsibility.
4. Science Communication and Public Engagement
How do you communicate climate change to a public that is simultaneously bombarded with information and resistant to changing behaviour? This question has run through the blog since its first post in 2012, and the posts in this section engage with it from multiple angles: rhetorical strategy, reception theory, the role of fiction, the challenge of bushfire communication, and the new possibilities and pitfalls of AI-assisted climate communication.
Climate communication conundrums (2012)
The blog’s first post on climate communication, written in 2012 when debates about how to talk with people about climate change were intensifying. The post examines the central conundrums: should communicators emphasise certainty or uncertainty, urgency or hope, global or local? It maps the competing schools of thought in science communication and asks whether there is any escape from the bind that almost any communication choice can be criticised as either alarmist or complacent.
Science/climate communication: A view from reception theory (2017)
In this post, which is methodologically quite novel, I approach climate communication through the lens of reception theory, the tradition, associated with Jauss and Iser, that foregrounds the active role of the reader in producing meaning from texts. The post argues that climate communication is too often studied from the sender’s perspective, and that taking readers and viewers seriously as meaning-makers might open up new approaches to understanding why climate messages land so differently for different audiences.
What is a climate change communicator to do? (2019)
This is a stocktaking post written in the summer of 2019, a year of school strikes, Extinction Rebellion, and record temperatures, asking whether the strategies recommended by communication researchers were adequate to the urgency of the moment. The post reviews the evidence on framing, values, and narrative approaches, and ends with a degree of honest uncertainty: communication research can offer tools but cannot guarantee that anyone will use them or that they will work.
Bushfires and climate change communication (2020)
Written during Australia’s catastrophic Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020, when Scott Morrison’s government was still resisting explicit links between the fires and climate change, this post examines how the fires were being communicated and miscommunicated to the public. Drawing on earlier work on extreme weather communication, it asks what happens when the political context of climate communication is actively hostile, and whether images of burning koalas and orange skies could do what words had failed to do.
Extreme event/weather communication (2022)
A reflection on the state of extreme event communication in 2022, examining the growing body of research on how to convey the links between individual weather events and climate change to non-specialist audiences. The post reviews recent work on attribution communication, risk framing, and the role of local versus global messaging, and asks whether the communication field has kept pace with the increasing frequency and severity of the events it is trying to explain.
Chatting with chatbots about the climate crisis (2024)
An exploratory post in which I put questions about climate change to several AI chatbots and reflect on the results. The post is neither a celebration nor a condemnation of AI in climate communication, but an honest attempt to understand what these tools do well (synthesising large amounts of information, presenting multiple perspectives) and where they fall short (handling uncertainty, conveying urgency, adapting to context). A placeholder for a rapidly developing field, and a reminder that the newest communication tools come with their own conundrums.
5. Climate, Culture and Society
Climate change is not only a scientific and political phenomenon but a cultural one. It shapes and is shaped by fiction, art, health, memory, and the way communities understand their place in time and the natural world. The posts in this section range from climate fiction and cultural history to personal reflections, from the orange skies of Canadian wildfire smoke to the shrinking horizons of a changing world.
Unseasonable weather, unseasonable climate (2012)
This post was an early meditation on the experience of unseasonable weather and what it does to our sense of the normal. Drawing on literary and cultural examples alongside news coverage, the post asks how the experience of weather that feels wrong — too warm, too wet, too early — shapes popular intuitions about climate change. The post sits at the intersection of climate fiction and cultural analysis: weather as a felt phenomenon rather than a statistical abstraction.
Taking charge of the apocalypse: On serendipity, walruses and last men (2012)
This is another rather personal reflection that brings together thoughts on apocalyptic events like climate change and pandemics and literary explorations of the apocalypse such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, published in 1826.
Climate fiction: The anticipation and exploration of plausible futures (2014)
This post provides an overview of the emerging genre of climate fiction (cli-fi) and its role in making the consequences of climate change imaginable. The post surveys key novels and films, reflects on the difference between dystopian fiction that provokes despair and fiction that imagines agency and adaptation, and asks what literature can do that science communication cannot: create inhabited emotionally available futures rather than abstract projections.
Climate science and climate fiction: Alarmist, really? (2015)
As response to criticisms that climate fiction was alarmist and counterproductive, this post argues that fiction operates by different rules from science communication: it is permitted to imagine worst cases, inhabit emotional extremes, and provoke rather than reassure. Drawing on the ‘alarmism’ debates traced elsewhere in the blog, it asks whether the charge of alarmism levelled at cli-fi is a category error as it judges imaginative literature by the norms of risk communication.
Climate change and the tragedy of our shrinking horizons (2015)
This is a reflective and somewhat elegiac post on what climate change does to our sense of the future. Drawing on the concept of temporal discounting and on cultural analyses of how societies imagine time, it argues that one of the less-discussed harms of climate change is the way it forecloses futures and shrinks the range of what can be anticipated, planned for, or hoped.
The crucial role of culture in climate change (2015)
A post arguing that culture — shared values, narratives, and ways of making meaning — is not a peripheral factor in climate change but a central one. Drawing on Mike Hulme’s work and on social representations theory, it contends that how societies culturally understand their relationship to nature, risk, and the future shapes what they are willing to do about climate change just as much as information and incentives. The post makes an argument for bringing cultural analysis into climate policy discussions.
Climate, science and politics: The certainty and consensus confusion (2016)
Also listed in Climate Politics, this post has a cultural as well as political dimension: it examines how religious rhetoric, such as appeals to faith, heresy, dogma, entered the climate consensus debate, with critics accusing scientists of treating consensus as a matter of belief rather than evidence. The post asks what it means when the language of religion migrates into disputes about scientific authority, and what this reveals about the deeper cultural tensions underlying climate politics. (See also under Climate Politics, Scepticism and Denial.)
Air con and the apocalypse (2018)
This post was prompted by one of my frequent visits to eye casualty and dealing with air conditioning when you are suffering from severe dry eye syndrome. Air con is not only a signal but also an amplifier of climate change. It makes the point that air con is a solution but also a problem. My own problem is that it dries out the eyes. But there are many others. We need to solve them though for the sake of our health and that of the planet.
When climate change hits home: A personal story (2021)
Also listed under Extreme Weather, this post belongs equally in Culture and Society for its meditation on memory, place, and loss. The flooding of the Ahr valley — a landscape associated with holidays, family, wine, and a particular sense of German cultural life — becomes an occasion to reflect on what it means when the places that anchor personal and cultural identity are destroyed by events that we have, collectively, failed to prevent. (See also under Extreme Weather, Fire and Floods.)
Orange is the new bleak (2023)
Written in the summer of 2023, when wildfire smoke from Canadian fires turned the skies of New York and other eastern US cities an eerie orange, this post reflects on the cultural and aesthetic experience of a colour that has become a signifier of climate crisis. Orange, once associated with sunsets, harvest, warmth, now indexes danger, evacuation, and the Anthropocene. A short and resonant meditation on colour, culture, and catastrophe.
Climate change and health: Early and late warnings (2023)
A post examining the long arc of warnings about the health consequences of climate change, from early public health research in the 1990s through to the Lancet Countdown and the increasing integration of health impacts into mainstream climate communication. The post asks why health, a domain that might be expected to resonate personally with many people, has been relatively slow to become a central frame for public engagement with climate change, and what the implications are now that it is finally moving centre stage.
Outlook….
I started this anthology project in the middle of a second 2026 heatwave that affected much of Europe. Words like heat dome and wet bulb, whose emergence I had charted years ago, were becoming commonplace. Climate change was increasingly mentioned as a contributing factor to such heat waves, but generally after talking about records being broken, as if it was all about winning a race, and amid pictures of people having fun in the sun – at least at the beginning of the heatwave.
As the heatwave continued there was more discussion of air conditioning, its lack in Europe, its pros and cons, with the debate being gradually drawn into a new culture war and political polarisation instead of looking for the best ways of keeping people AND the planet cool and healthy – an issue I had discussed from a personal angle in a 2018 post.
Since 2012 I have seen many metaphors, from climate cliff to heat dome, come and go and I have recorded their use and misuse. And still the world is heating, and we are living in ever more extreme weather conditions. Climate change communication is still necessary and useful – we should never just stop talking about the climate and the weather – but there is now some desperation creeping in.
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