Brigitte Nerlich
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Consensus in science
June 25, 2015
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 …
Extreme weather talk: The sequel
June 4, 2015
Two years ago I published a blog post on extreme weather. This showed that unlike media reporting on climate change, which has generally been going down since 2007 (with some variations and a bit of an upsurge now, see Max Boykoff’s graph at CSTPR), media reporting on ‘extreme weather’ seems to be going up more …
Ta(l)king responsibility
May 28, 2015
In social science and policy circles there has been a lot of talk about Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). However, nobody quite knows yet what this means and how it works in the context of harsh economic realities. In the meantime, natural scientists have taken responsibility for their research and innovations in the context of …
Climate linguistics
May 18, 2015
In a recent news article about the origins and spread of the concept ‘climate denial’, the E&E reporter Jean Chemnick refers to me as a specialist in ‘climate linguistics’. Somebody asked me on twitter whether this field existed and some people searched my academia profile to find out more. I myself also googled around a …
Lukewarmers
May 14, 2015
On 3 May (2015) Tamsin Edwards wrote an article for The Observer entitled “The lukewarmers don’t deny climate change. But they say the outlook’s fine” (see here for a discussion; I should point out that Tamsin didn’t choose the title for this article). This prompted Steven Mosher to write the following comment: “Lukewarmers have come …
Climate scepticism in Australia
May 8, 2015
Much has been written about those who doubt various tenets of mainstream climate science. Much of this literature has focused on the United States. Far less attention has been paid to Australia, despite the fact that climate change has emerged as a central issue for Australian politics and science. When studying the use of various …
Images of the cell in art and science: An update
May 7, 2015
This is a Guest POST by Maura C. Flannery, Professor of Biology, St. John’s University, NY, reflecting on, what one may call ‘making cells public’ and the interactions between art and science in this process. The blog is related to an images and visualisation project funded by the European Science Foundation, rather than to the …
Responsible Research and Innovation: Experts, values and judgements
May 3, 2015
Expertise, judgement and values are huge topics in philosophy, psychology and the social sciences in general. I am no expert on these issues. However, I believe that the new Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) agenda imposes a duty to reflect on these notions on those who, like me, are supposed to ‘implement’ RRI within large …
The bioeconomy in the news (or not)
April 30, 2015
At meetings of the BBSRC/EPSRC funded Synthetic Biology Research Centre here at Nottingham the word ‘bioeconomy‘ crops up now and again, which is not surprising, as synthetic biology is supposed to be part of this new economy. In a blog post written in December last year the BBSRC’s Chief Executive Jackie Hunter pointed out that: …
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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