Orange is the new bleak*

I was recently reflecting on the way extreme weather events manifest themselves in different colours. Floods are brown and ugly; there is brown flood water and then there is brown mud everywhere (more on that here). Wildfires are orange and, in a sense, beautiful; there are orange sunsets and sunrises, but what’s left behind is …

The climate speaks in words and pictures: Is anybody listening?

I can’t open twitter nowadays without being confronted by red-hot images of heatwaves, just like a few weeks ago it was all about wildfires, orange skies and smoke. The climate is speaking to us, indeed sending us smoke signals, from the air, the land and the water which are all alarmingly warm. This is not …

Bushfires and climate change communication: Between amplification and attenuation

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 …