Blogs, publics and controversies: climate change lectures in February
January 14, 2014
Time to unveil three four FIVE! exciting climate change lectures hosted by Making Science Public in February. Superb speakers examining different perspectives on one of the defining issues of modern public life. All are welcome to these lectures, all held on University Park campus. Thursday, February 6th: 1-2pm, Law & Social Sciences (West Wing), A100 Amelia Sharman …
Climate change targetism: scientific numbers, managerial policy
November 27, 2013
It is five years since the Climate Change Act was given Royal Assent. This groundbreaking piece of legislation provided a huge boost to environmental campaigners who had long campaigned for government to make such a move. It also denoted a key stage in David Cameron’s ‘detoxification’ strategy of the Conservative Party while in opposition, as …
Mike Hulme: What Do Citizens and Scientists Expect of Each Other?
November 7, 2013
This is a guest post by Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate and Culture at King’s College, London: Over the last couple of weeks I have found myself in three very different settings in which challenging questions have been asked about the relationship between scientific knowledge and personal belief and social behaviour. Each time this has …
The Subterranean War on Science? A comment.
November 3, 2013
Last week saw the publication of an article entitled “The Subterranean War on Science” in the Association of Psychological Science’s Observer magazine. The authors – scientists from a range of disciplines – reflect on their experiences of their work becoming noticed in public. In particular, they argue that the harassment, bullying and abuse of scientists constitute a ‘war …
Global science, local perspectives – how does climate change fit into policy priorities?
October 17, 2013
I present here a synopsis of a lecture I gave yesterday for year 3 undergraduates on our Climate, Science and Society module at University of Nottingham. The session was two hours long, which is rather a long time to listen to one person. So to ensure an engaged audience, I gave around an hour and …
Consensus on climate change: Tracing the contours of a debate
August 23, 2013
Soon the new IPCC report on climate change will be published (a leaked version is already circulating). This will probably generate a lot of talk about what one may call the four Cs: Consensus, certainty, confidence and credibility (let alone the other two Cs: climate and change). The discussion about consensus is already in full …
More heat than light? Climate catastrophe and the Hiroshima bomb
August 14, 2013
There has been some discussion on Twitter today (14 August) about the wisdom or otherwise of measuring the heat being retained by the Earth in terms of Hiroshima bombs. The analogy is presented by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli on their Skeptical Science blog, drawing on an academic paper by Church et al to describe the heat …
Are climate sceptics the real champions of the scientific method?
August 12, 2013
At the Science in Public conference, which we hosted in July, Alice Bell convened a panel on science and the green movement. Following the conference Alice asked me to contribute to a series of posts on the same theme for the Guardian’s Political Science blog, focusing on my research area of climate scepticism. The post …
What’s behind the battle of received wisdoms?
July 23, 2013
This is a guest essay by Ben Pile, a writer for Spiked Online and his own blog Climate Resistance. There is a response by Dana Nuccitelli from the Guardian’s Climate Consensus blog here. Andrew Neil’s interview with Ed Davey on the Sunday Politics show last week caused an eruption of comment. For sceptics, it was a refreshing …
Extreme weather talk: Making climate public?
June 19, 2013
This is yet another in a series of blog posts where I try to show how one can use publicly available data (newspaper databases or Google Insight for Search) to observe patterns and shifts in public attention to climate change. Other posts have dealt with some first reflections on extreme weather, Hurricane Sandy, alarmism, carbon …
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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