Wildfires and wild liars
January 13, 2025
I have written about wildfires and bushfires and climate change since 2012, here, here, here, here and here, for example. I should have written about the Paradise Fire or the Maui Fire, but I didn’t. And now we have the awful Southern California urban wildfires. What can one say? Fortunately, people more knowledgeable than I …
Plausible climate futures – a book review
November 22, 2024
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 …
Chatting with chatbots about the climate crisis
November 15, 2024
Last week, I had another adventure in AI land. This started by accident, as so many adventures do. It all came about because I read about an interesting symposium organised in Amsterdam by Anaïs Augé’s and Gudrun Reijnierse on “Public responses to the language of science communication: Uptake, acceptance, resistance”. As part of this symposium, …
Biochar in the news
June 7, 2024
In this blog post Carol Morris, Catherine Price and I want to present two articles on a rather niche topic relating to climate change mitigation – niche but nevertheless interesting and important: biochar. What is biochar? Biochar is amongst a growing suite of approaches developed to address the climate crisis by removing carbon dioxide from …
Seeding clouds – seeding doubts
May 3, 2024
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 …