Brigitte Nerlich
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Heat dome: Atmosphere, architecture and agency
July 11, 2025
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 …
Unmuting the message: Climate communication in a complex world
July 1, 2025
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 …
My blog: End of an era or new beginning?
June 20, 2025
This week I got an email from the University of Nottingham which made me quite sad: “I am contacting you as you are listed as a user on a blog on the blogs.nottingham.ac.uk site. The university will stop hosting the site from the end of December 2025. It is now home to a very small …
Public engagement with AI: Some obstacles and paradoxes
June 13, 2025
I recently listened to a webinar by social scientists who had studied what AI researchers say about public reception of AI. The most important words I heard were ‘evidence’ (about public attitudes to and inclusion in AI) and ‘voices’ (of communities underrepresented in or negatively impacted by AI). The main argument was, I think, that …
Carbon bombs: On climate change and lexical change
May 2, 2025
Have you heard about car bombs? Surely, you have. Have you heard about ‘carbon bombs’. Probably not. I hadn’t, until my husband shoved The Guardian under my nose this morning and pointed to a headline saying: “UK banks put £75bn into firms building climate-wrecking ‘carbon bombs’, study finds”. He did that because he knew that …
Space, hype and science communication
April 25, 2025
I recently wrote a post with Kate Roach about some hyped-up claims regarding de-extinct dire wolves. In the middle of writing about this, another claim came along, and, again, I thought “hmmm, is that really true or is it hype?”. This time it was not about de-extinct life but about extraterrestrial life. At the same …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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