Category: Climate Change
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Rio plus 20 minus hope
The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development has recently been held in Rio de Janeiro (20-22 June, 2012). This summit has come to be known as Rio+20, as it was organised to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which, it should be pointed out, was organised 20 years after the…
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Scepticism: Process, not position
Scepticism activism Scepticism is as old as human thinking, as old as philosophy and as old as science. Most recently scepticism has, on the one hand, become embroiled in a major controversy about climate change, and on the other hand scepticism has also become a form of activism, with Skeptics in the Pub being a…
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GM food, war metaphors and the perils of political entrenchment
It’s the Jubilee weekend. It’s raining. So I am looking through some tweets. Some make me think I should cheer myself up by writing a blog about songs used to make science (especially quantum physics!) public, others make me think that I really should write something about war metaphors in the current GM debate. As…
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Carbon and energy/publics and politics
This is a follow-up to a guest-blog on climategate, media volume and public concern. As last time, this blog was written by Alan Valdez (The Open University) in collaboration with Brigitte Nerlich (University of Nottingham) and Nelya Koteyko (University of Leicester). It is linked to research on climate change discourses funded by the ESRC and…
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Communicating climate change on the right (report)
This is a guest blog by Warren Pearce who will be starting work on the Making Science Public project in October this year. Warren reports on an event organised by the Policy Exchange: A greener shade of blue? Communicating climate change on the right. The blog was originally published here. ‘A grit in the oyster’…
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Languages of uncertainty
Communicating scientific uncertainty There has recently been a lot of discussion about communicating uncertainty in science in general and climate change/climate science in particular. Many scientists, including Sir Robert May and Sir John Beddington have talked about how uncertainty is intrinsic to science and have advocated being more open about uncertainty, with the latter stressing…
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Climate communication conundrums
After climategate in 2009 I was reflecting on what this episode (which sort of opened the ‘door’ for the current climate ‘wars’) may mean for climate change communication. One thing struck me at the time: that climategate can be used to rhetorically flip previous (contrarian) discourses around climate change and climate science on their heads.…
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Climategate, media volume and public concerns – what’s the relation?
In my last blog I promised some further discussion of the link between media volume and public concern about climate change. This is what today’s blog is about, based on some work I carried out with a former MA student, Alan Valdez. Discussions about the agenda-setting power of the media, particularly in the context of…
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Weather or Climate? Enjoy or worry?
Gardening One afternoon last week I was watering some newly planted shrubs in the garden. The sun was warming my back and I was trying to enjoy that experience. However, there was this nagging voice in my head saying ‘drought, drought, drought’. In the evening I did the washing up, which I usually also enjoy,…
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Waiting for gate-gate
Debates about climate change (global warming, the greenhouse effect and so on) have a long history. However, observers of the debate generally agree that 1988, the year that the IPCC was created, was the year that climate science became climate politics. From then onwards there was, on the one hand, a steady accumulation of scientific…
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