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Making Science Public 2024: End of year round-up of blog posts

It’s that time of year again when I write my round-up of all the blog posts that I have written over the year. There were more posts than I expected. I have tried to group them into topics, some of which you might be interested in, others not. This year, I mostly explored the ever-expanding …

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Plausible climate futures – a book review

I was recently watching the images of the devastating floods in the Valencia region of Spain. This brought back memories of the 2021 German floods and all the mud and debris they left behind. I also read an article by the world expert in extreme weather attribution, Friederike Otto who argued that, despite so many …

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Mud, metaphors and politics: Meaning-making during the 2021 German floods

This post is a brief summary of an article Rusi Jaspal and I wrote in the aftermath of the 2021 floods in Germany. Many more floods have happened since then in many more parts of the world. The article was published online in 2023 and has only just come out in print, in June 2024, …

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Seeding clouds – seeding doubts

In 2009, two things happened in climate change discussions that at first glance seem to be quite unconnected. Firstly, the Royal Society released a seminal report on ‘geoengineering’—the deliberate alteration or creation of weather and climate conditions (which is generally considered unwise). Secondly, the ‘climategate‘ controversy emerged, portraying climate scientists as clandestinely tampering with or …

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Making science public 2023: End-of-year round up of blog posts

The year 2023 began with a bang. Suddenly there was a new form of ‘artificial intelligence’, and by ‘new’ I mean a form of AI that even I could use and vaguely understand. There was, it seems, some monstrous machine (called LLM) gobbling up everything we have ever produced in science, literature and art and …

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From Omicron to Omega: What’s in a name?

The last few years have been years of planetary upheaval. We have all lived through a Covid-19 pandemic and are, in fact, still living with it, and we have all felt the effects of climate change. To deal with these planetary events, we had to invent and learn new concepts and new names. Quite recently, …

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Orange is the new bleak*

I was recently reflecting on the way extreme weather events manifest themselves in different colours. Floods are brown and ugly; there is brown flood water and then there is brown mud everywhere (more on that here). Wildfires are orange and, in a sense, beautiful; there are orange sunsets and sunrises, but what’s left behind is …

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The climate speaks in words and pictures: Is anybody listening?

I can’t open twitter nowadays without being confronted by red-hot images of heatwaves, just like a few weeks ago it was all about wildfires, orange skies and smoke. The climate is speaking to us, indeed sending us smoke signals, from the air, the land and the water which are all alarmingly warm. This is not …

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Climate change and health: Early and late warnings

Last week I saw various tweets from the Wellcome Trust announcing a new funding scheme that will support research on the impacts of #ClimateChange on human health, centring on communities most at risk (an announcement that by the way, was illustrated with a tryptic of photos of lone individuals dealing with a flood, a fire …

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Making Science Public 2022: End of year round-up of blog posts

This is now the 10th time that I have written an overview of the blog posts I have published over the preceding year. Phew! How time flies. Strangely, this year has been quite productive. I have posted more stuff about Covid, of course, but also about monkey pox, as well as about climate change, gene …

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