December 10, 2015, by Lindsay Brooke

Monitoring the climate change talks

Academics at The University of Nottingham have been keeping a close watch on the climate change talks in Paris.

Brigitte Nerlich, Professor of Science, Language and Society, and Dr Warren Pearce, a Research Fellow on the University of Nottingham’s Making Science Public programme  are part of an international team covering the summit with their Media Watch Blog:

http://www.climatematters.hamburg/media-watch-blog/about-our-blog/

Meet the media watch bloggers.

http://www.climatematters.hamburg/media-watch-blog/media-watch-bloggers/

What are University of Nottingham academics saying on the Media Watch Blog?

Brigitte asks if COP21 is ‘A new chance for common sense and common action’.

Yesterday Warren was analysing twitter and hashtag trends from COP21.

A third contribution was written by Reiner Grundmann, Professor of Science and Technology Studies here at The University of Nottingham.

Professor Nerlich said: “In the run up to the Paris climate talks, Michael Brüggemann, Professor of Communication Research, Climate and Science Communication, contacted me. He works at University of Hamburg Excellence Cluster “CliSAP” (Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction), where he leads research on media constructions of climate change. He invited me to become part of the blogging team for a Media Watch Blog on the climate summit in Paris which is linked to his new website www.climatematters.hamburg.”

There’s more climate communication to come

Warren will be leading a new ESRC research project next year which will focus on online climate communication. The twitter data analysed briefly in the blog (based on a collaboration with Finnish colleagues) will be part of that wider project.

The project, ‘Making Climate Social‘, builds on work carried out within the Making Science Public programme. It will investigate the implications of the social media revolution for the science and politics of climate change. He will explore the contributors, content, connections and contexts of social media climate change communications through a novel combination of ‘big data’ analysis of social media content and ethnographic study of how social media is used ‘in the field’. The project will begin with an analysis of social media communication about the Paris climate summit.

Brigitte directs the Leverhulme Trust funded programme of research ‘Making Science Public: Challenges and Opportunities‘ and is the social science lead on Responsible Research and Innovation within the ‘Synthetic Biology Research Centre’. For the last fifteen years she has immersed herself in the social, cultural and media study of science, especially biotechnology, nanotechnology, epidemics and climate change. She blogs on Making Science Public and tweets @BNerlich. You can read most of her articles on academia.edu.

Warren has been Research Fellow on the University of Nottingham’s Making Science Public programme since 2012. His research focuses on the changing meanings of knowledge as it moves between science, publics and policymakers, and the political implications of such changing meanings. He has applied this research agenda across a range of significant contemporary case studies, including climate change communication and policy. He tweets at @WarrenPearce.

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