Category: Climate Politics
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Making Science Public blog posts 2015: An overview
This year the Making Science Public blog has been dominated by two topics: climate change and synthetic biology. One topic is on the way out, so to speak, as the climate change focused project within our research programme is coming to an end. It will continue though in a new guise, in the shape of…
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Climate science and climate fiction: Alarmist, really?
For more than 25 years, climate scientists have warned politicians and the general public about the dangers posed by global warming. Sometimes they have been listened to; more often then not they have been accused of alarmism. For more than a century, novelists and film makers have explored the possible, often catastrophic and dystopian, effects…
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COP21: A new chance for common sense and common action?
Professor Michael Brüggemann and his research team at the University of Hamburg have set up a blog called Media Watch Blog. This blog will report on the Paris climate summit, COP21, as it unfolds. Here is my contribution to the blog, reposted below in a slightly longer version. ••• The 2015 United Nations Climate Change…
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Anchoring doubt
For five years now I have been interested in how doubts about climate change are expressed by whom and how. To be honest, I very much doubt I have found out anything new. However, when reading some blogs recently, something struck me. But before I come to that, lets start at the beginning. Science and…
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Climate change and the tragedy of our shrinking horizons
A few days ago, on 29 September 2015, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, used the phrase ‘tragedy of the horizon’ in a speech on “climate risks for the global economy and global financial stability with a focus on the insurance sector”. This got me thinking about the various times the concept…
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The pause
About three years ago, in 2013, I became aware of discussions around the ‘pause’ (a period of relatively little change in globally averaged surface temperatures) and since then I have been observing goings-on around this new talking point in the climate change debate. I was a bit surprised by how much trouble a wiggle in…
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The crucial role of culture in climate change
On Wednesday, I attended the US Ambassador’s ‘digital dialogue’ event on climate change at Winfield House, where policy wonks, journalists, NGO representatives and academics discussed their current hopes and frustrations. Beyond the usual grumbles about ‘bogus arguments’ against climate action, it was pleasing that some attendees outside of the social sciences chose to highlight the key role of cultural…
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Climate wars
At the end of August Barry Woods asked on Twitter when the phrase ‘climate wars’ was first used and Warren Pearce ‘paged’ me. I was on holiday, so I didn’t have time to properly look into this. I still haven’t got a lot of time, but I have started to dig a bit. When you…
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Carbon pollution
As a linguist I have been interested in ‘carbon compounds’ for a long time, that is, phrases that combine the word ‘carbon’ with other words to form new units of meaning. Using lexical carbon compounds, we can talk about anything, from ‘carbon awareness’ to ‘carbon zealots’. ‘Carbon pollution’ is one of these compounds which pack…
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Consensus in science
At the Circling the Square 2 conference there was a lot of talk about ‘consensus’ and Mike Hulme gave an inspiring key note lecture about the concept from a philosophical and sociological perspective (Paul Matthews has provided a summary on the conference blog). All this made me think a bit more about the meaning of…
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