Tag: wildfire
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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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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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Floods and fires: Reciprocal metaphorical mappings in crisis response
Psychologists, sociologists, linguists and many others have studied how people respond to extreme weather events, such as floods or wildfires. Some linguists have been interested in particular in analysing the use and impact of metaphors. When we studied the 2021 German floods, Rusi Jaspal and I found that floods were either metaphorically framed as human,…
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Wildfires and wild liars
I have written about wildfires and bushfires and climate change since 2012, here, here, here, here and here, for example. I should have written about the Paradise Fire or the Maui Fire, but I didn’t. And now we have the awful Southern California urban wildfires. What can one say? Fortunately, people more knowledgeable than I…
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The sky is falling and the trees are crying: Reflections on extreme weather
For some weeks now, I wanted to write something about ‘rain bombs’, a relatively new weather/climate phenomenon and metaphor – but I didn’t get round to it. Then, last week, when I sat down to write, thoughts about strong rain were displaced by thoughts about fire and heat. In the end I decided to write…