Category: Climate Change
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What’s in a name? Man-made climate, biology and intelligence
On 22 September 2026, at the UN General Assembly, President Trump announced that the United States “totally rejects” any attempt to construct a global scheme to control artificial intelligence, and then did something that no linguist can ignore: he renamed it. “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake,” he said. “It is…
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The apo-collapse
In April 2024 I asked myself a question and then didn’t answer it. Back then I was writing a blog post about “model collapse”, the unsettling metaphor for what happens when an AI trains on its own output, degrading generation after generation like a digital case of mad cow disease. I then began to wonder…
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Making extreme weather personal, again: Wildfires in the US, the UK and Germany
On 4 August a wildfire started near where my twin sister lives in New Mexico. This was not unprecedented. Indeed I have written here on the blog about fires there in 2011 and in 2022. What was unprecedented was that I heard about it in the middle of seeing pictures of wildfires all over the…
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Climate change and language: An anthology of blog posts
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…
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Cancelled due to extreme heat
I was going to cancel this week’s post due to the heat — then I noticed I wasn’t alone. We are currently living or rather sweating through the second heatwave this year. It’s really quite bad. There is talk about heat domes and wet bulbs, new climate words that I have been talking about over…
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Mud, monsters and solidarity: Social representations of the 2024 Valencia floods
Last week I wrote a post about the 2025 California wildfires. This week’s post is about the 2024 Valencia floods. These are just two examples of increasingly frequent extreme weather events that affect people around the word. They also affect the language we speak, especially the metaphors we use to make sense of such events.…
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Fire, wind, and lies: How we talk about wildfire shapes how we respond
Rusi Jaspal and I recently published an article on the metaphorical framing of the January 2025 Southern California wildfires. Here is a short blog post about it to whet your appetite for the real thing which appeared online first in Metaphor and the Social World under the title “Fire, wind and lies: Mapping the metaphorical…
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AI veganism: A new dietary metaphor for a new type of discourse
A couple of weeks ago, I told my former colleague Sujatha Raman that I was collecting metaphors for AI, such as AI slop for example. She asked: “Have you heard about AI veganism?” I said no, I hadn’t, whereupon she sent me an article from The Guardian and that set me off down a rabbit…
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“Don’t bang your head on the guardrails”: Geoengineering metaphors, 2026
Sitting on a bus and browsing my timeline on Bluesky on Friday 9 January, I came across a comment by Gaia Vince saying: “Interesting to see the Guardian running a couple sensible opinion pieces on geoengineering recently”. I opened an article she pointed to and immediately saw a juicy metaphor: “In this sense, research acts…
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Making Science Public 2025: End-of-year round-up of blog posts
This year has been quite a year! First, I had to move the blog to a new independent home after the University of Nottingham shut down their blogging platform (I wrote two posts about this, one reflecting on the past and one on the future). Second, there was a lot to blog about, from wildfires…