Making weather personal

I was idly reading The Observer on Sunday (2 March, 2014), when I happened to glance at an article about the Scottish island of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. I read: “The past few months, too, have shown how vulnerable an island community is when the weather becomes truculent”. Truculent I thought; that’s …

Extreme weather talk: Making climate public?

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 …

Extreme weather events, climate change and the media

I am not a scientist. I am a media analyst of sorts. I therefore cannot check the veracity of scientific statements that establish a link between climate change and an increase in frequency of extreme weather events or scientific statements that dispute such a link. I also find it difficult to assess what climate is, …

Unseasonable weather; unseasonable climate? Facts, fictions and fantasies

I have just come back from a place in Dorset that my husband’s family has visited every summer for the last forty years or so and that I have visited for the last twenty. I sometimes needed to take and wear an anorak. This has changed and I have been wearing it more often over …