Search for "extreme weather"
Bushfires and climate change communication: Between amplification and attenuation
January 10, 2020
For about a decade I have been thinking and writing about extreme weather events and their links to human-induced climate change, and this included quite a few references to Australia, especially droughts, heatwaves and bushfires. I thought the Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico, lived through by some of my family, was bad. I thought …
Making Science Public 2019: An overview
December 17, 2019
Every year I think: This will be the last year I write something for this blog… and each year I write a bit more. And so it was this year. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I really don’t know. But it distracts me from life’s increasing troubles and keeps me sane. …
Climategate: Some reflections
November 15, 2019
Ten years ago (it seems like yesterday), I was doing relatively pedestrian research on how people talked about climate change. Then, one morning I woke up to the news that emails by climate scientists had been hacked and were being used to cast doubt on the credibility of climate science and the integrity of climate …
Are we all alarmists now?
July 13, 2018
Over the years I have written many posts about extreme weather events on the one hand and quite a few on so-called alarmism on the other. This was in the context of working on issues related to climate change communication. Some years ago, when writing an article on communicating climate change, I included a sentence …
Hurricane Harvey: Some reflections on climate change communication
August 29, 2017
Hurricane Harvey has hit Houston and its aftermath is causing extreme flooding. This made me think… I remember sitting in an airport lounge in 2005 somewhere watching Hurricane Katrina unfold on TV screens and beginning to think about climate change as a social issue. A year or so later I started to notice the spread of a …
Climate science and climate fiction: Alarmist, really?
December 6, 2015
For more than 25 years, climate scientists have warned politicians and the general public about the dangers posed by global warming. Sometimes they have been listened to; more often then not they have been accused of alarmism. For more than a century, novelists and film makers have explored the possible, often catastrophic and dystopian, effects …
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 …
Making science public: A compilation of blog posts – 2014
December 19, 2014
It is time again for my end of year blog of blog posts. Unbelievably, this is already the third time I am doing this. How time flies! Strange — so far we haven’t had a post about time! This is quite surprising, as otherwise we have had posts about more or less everything under the …
Climate fiction: The anticipation and exploration of plausible futures
July 27, 2014
A few days ago Paul Collins asked me whether an emerging fictional genre, namely climate fiction or cli-fi, could help engage people with climate change. I had to confess that I had come across this new genre but had not thought about it in depth. This type of ignorance and confusion has never prevented me …