Climate, science and politics: The certainty and consensus confusion
April 24, 2016
In this, my probably final, blog post on climate change, I’ll return to a topic that has troubled me for many years, namely religious rhetoric used in debates about climate change science and climate change politics. The terrain between climate change science and climate change politics has become a bit of a swamp and the …
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 …
Anchoring doubt
October 30, 2015
For five years now I have been interested in how doubts about climate change are expressed by whom and how. To be honest, I very much doubt I have found out anything new. However, when reading some blogs recently, something struck me. But before I come to that, lets start at the beginning. Science and …
The pause
September 28, 2015
About three years ago, in 2013, I became aware of discussions around the ‘pause’ (a period of relatively little change in globally averaged surface temperatures) and since then I have been observing goings-on around this new talking point in the climate change debate. I was a bit surprised by how much trouble a wiggle in …
Basic science and climate politics: A flashback to 1989
February 20, 2015
We were trying to empty a room for refurbishment. So we rummaged through some old papers which included amongst many others: Karl Popper’s last paper entitled “Towards an evolutionary theory of knowledge” (with the enigmatic scribble: ‘Popper’s last paper is better than ‘Krapps last tape’), and a typescript from 1989 of a speech by Margaret …
An accurately informed public is necessary for climate policy
July 29, 2013
This is a guest essay by Dana Nuccitelli Last week, the Making Science Public blog published a guest post by Ben Pile, What’s behind the battle of received wisdoms?, which focused on Andrew Neil’s interview with Ed Davey on BBC Sunday Politics and my articles at The Guardian discussing the scientific errors Neil made on …