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The sky is falling and the trees are crying: Reflections on extreme weather

For some weeks now, I wanted to write something about ‘rain bombs’, a relatively new weather/climate phenomenon and metaphor – but I didn’t get round to it. Then, last week, when I sat down to write, thoughts about strong rain were displaced by thoughts about fire and heat. In the end I decided to write …

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Extreme weather talk: The sequel to the sequel

I have written quite a few blog posts over the years about extreme weather (and weather and climate). In 2013 I also published an article with Rusi Jaspal about extreme weather images… That seems now a long time ago and much better work is now done on the images front! I wrote my last post …

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Extreme weather talk: The sequel

Two years ago I published a blog post on extreme weather. This showed that unlike media reporting on climate change, which has generally been going down since 2007 (with some variations and a bit of an upsurge now, see Max Boykoff’s graph at CSTPR), media reporting on ‘extreme weather’ seems to be going up more …

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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 …

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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, …

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Extreme event/weather communication

Communication sciences span a large array of fields and issues. We have science communication, risk communication, crisis communication, health communication, and, of course climate change communication. Over the last few years, it has become clear to me that when it comes to climate and weather, all these communication efforts converge and become part of what …

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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 …

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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 …

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Weather or Climate? Enjoy or worry?

Gardening One afternoon last week I was watering some newly planted shrubs in the garden. The sun was warming my back and I was trying to enjoy that experience. However, there was this nagging voice in my head saying ‘drought, drought, drought’.  In the evening I did the washing up, which I usually also enjoy, …

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Making Science Public 2024: End of year round-up of blog posts

It’s that time of year again when I write my round-up of all the blog posts that I have written over the year. There were more posts than I expected. I have tried to group them into topics, some of which you might be interested in, others not. This year, I mostly explored the ever-expanding …

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