Short circuiting the language of Sandy – how to balance literalism and lucidity?
November 14, 2012
My previous post here at MSP reflected on comments in the BBC’s Climategate Revisited programme, suggesting that uncertainties in climate science have come to the fore in the years following the publication of scientists’ emails. By being more open about such uncertainties, there may be a hope that some of the public trust lost after …
Echoes of Climategate: focusing on uncertainty?
November 13, 2012
The ever-lively climate blogosphere was given an extra jolt recently by a new BBC Radio 4 documentary – Climategate Revisited. The programme assessed the fallout from the infamous publication of emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) server, rather than attempting to adjudicate on scientific claims or the contents of the emails. The programme …
Debunking NIMBYs
November 4, 2012
Guest post by Beverley Gibbs (originally posted on her own blog). Photo courtesy of Lightsight. You’ve heard of NIMBY? Not In My Back Yard? It’s a term some people use to describe individuals – or more commonly groups – within local communities who resist new developments. The new developments can be anything including prisons, landfill sites, …
Science, politics and the new scepticism
October 14, 2012
While I blogged on MSP a couple of times while finishing up my thesis on local and regional climate policy, I have now started on the programme full time as a Research Fellow. My project has a working title of Science, politics and scepticism in the age of new media, and aims to “map the …
Taking charge of the apocalypse: On serendipity, walruses and last men
August 17, 2012
A week ago somebody sent me this YouTube video of a walrus that makes noises on command. I sent it on to a few people, including my sister. She sent me back a picture of a sea lion taken while on holiday in Alaska, which I have used as the featured image for this blog. …
Unseasonable weather; unseasonable climate? Facts, fictions and fantasies
July 15, 2012
I have just come back from a place in Dorset that my husband’s family has visited every summer for the last forty years or so and that I have visited for the last twenty. I sometimes needed to take and wear an anorak. This has changed and I have been wearing it more often over …
Rio plus 20 minus hope
June 26, 2012
The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development has recently been held in Rio de Janeiro (20-22 June, 2012). This summit has come to be known as Rio+20, as it was organised to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which, it should be pointed out, was organised 20 years after the …
Scepticism: Process, not position
June 16, 2012
Scepticism activism Scepticism is as old as human thinking, as old as philosophy and as old as science. Most recently scepticism has, on the one hand, become embroiled in a major controversy about climate change, and on the other hand scepticism has also become a form of activism, with Skeptics in the Pub being a …
GM food, war metaphors and the perils of political entrenchment
June 3, 2012
It’s the Jubilee weekend. It’s raining. So I am looking through some tweets. Some make me think I should cheer myself up by writing a blog about songs used to make science (especially quantum physics!) public, others make me think that I really should write something about war metaphors in the current GM debate. As …
Carbon and energy/publics and politics
May 20, 2012
This is a follow-up to a guest-blog on climategate, media volume and public concern. As last time, this blog was written by Alan Valdez (The Open University) in collaboration with Brigitte Nerlich (University of Nottingham) and Nelya Koteyko (University of Leicester). It is linked to research on climate change discourses funded by the ESRC and …
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
Find, follow, join us
