Category: Climate Change
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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…
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The Making Science Public blog: An introduction
I have now said farewell several times to my old university blogging platform, but I haven’t really started building up a new readership here. Newbies to the blog might wonder what the old Making Science Public blog was all about; what topics it covered before venturing to press the subscribe button….. As a gentle introduction…
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Heat dome: Atmosphere, architecture and agency
The phrase ‘heat dome’ has been around since the 1960s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But only recently has it gained currency as one of the many new (extreme) weather words signalling climate change. I first came across it in 2020 when I read reports on a horrible heat wave in India. At that…
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Unmuting the message
A few weeks ago Shanshan Zhang, Senior Scientific Editor at One Earth, Cell Press, asked me to write something about climate change communication, a topic I have been grappling with for a long time. At first I hesitated, but she really encouraged me and I am glad I wrote something. My little piece became part…
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Geoengineering and metaphors, 2009 to 2025: Continuity and change
Since around 2006, I have been interested in speculations about geoengineering, that is, attempts to deal with climate change by directly intervening in the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, or land. Such interventions include pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or dampening solar radiation. In the UK there have been three inflection points in reflections about such…
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Wildfires in the UK: How do we talk about them?
On 1 May 2025, a member of the UK Meteorological Office noted on Bluesky that: “With the temperature at Kew Gardens reaching 28.0°C and still climbing, it is now officially the warmest start to May on record for the UK.” At the same time, the Metro newspaper reported that “UK records hottest start to May…
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