Making Science Public

Tag: metaphor

  • More heat than light? Climate catastrophe and the Hiroshima bomb

    More heat than light? Climate catastrophe and the Hiroshima bomb

    There has been some discussion on Twitter today (14 August) about the wisdom or otherwise of measuring the heat being retained by the Earth in terms of Hiroshima bombs. The analogy is presented by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli on their Skeptical Science blog, drawing on an academic paper by Church et al to describe the heat…

  • Abseiling down the climate cliff metaphor

    Abseiling down the climate cliff metaphor

    Since its very beginning in the 1980s, public discourse about climate change has been structured by metaphors. We had the greenhouse effect, the carbon footprint, the hockey stick, the tipping point, and we also had climategate; and to these metaphors we can now add the ‘climate cliff’ (which one can almost see as an upside…

  • Making science public: The issue of language (jargon)

    Making science public: The issue of language (jargon)

    This is a guest blog by Gregory Hollin, a PhD student at the Institute for Science and Society (School of Sociology and Social Policy) Over recent days there has been a fascinating blog-based debate of great interest to the Making Science Public agenda. This debate focused on the nature of writing in the natural and…