I am interested to receive approaches from students who would like to study for a PhD with me in the areas of the cultural history of climate change, STS approaches to studying climate science and knowledge, representations and discourses of climate in the media, and the philosophy of climate and climate change. Please state clearly your […]
‘The Trick’: What Did Climategate Mean?
Tonight, the BBC broadcast ‘The Trick’, their commissioned TV drama of the 2009 Climategate affair. The drama focused on the relationship between Professor Phil Jones and his wife Ruth, and the handling of the controversy by Phil’s employer – the University of East Anglia – in the days and months after the unauthorised release of […]
‘The Retreat of Scientific Debate’
Just over a year ago, I was one of about 50 original co-signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration, a short statement which challenged the prevailing policy orthodoxy that societal lockdowns were the only way to combat the risks to society posed by COVID-19. I briefly rehearsed my reasons for doing so at the time — […]
The IPCC’s Mistaken “Science-First” Approach to Climate Change
The first of four separate reports comprising the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) was released today. This is the report of Working Group 1 (WG1), ‘The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change’. It makes for dramatic headlines and grabs attention. But the WG1 report also begs the most important questions about climate change: what policies […]
Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis
I have two chapters in the recently published book with OpenBook Publishers in Cambridge, ‘Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis: Social Science Perspectives‘. This is a collection of 28 essays written by social scientists, and edited by Steffen Böhm, Exeter...
Reading Climate Change Backwards: Five Varieties
Climate change is everywhere. In everyday speech, protest, advocacy, science, the arts, business and diplomacy. And there are of course some physical correlates to this discursive reality of climate change, namely changes occurring in the physical dynamics of the...
Advice to Christian Geography Professors
Earlier this year, I was invited by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Christian Scholar’s Review, Professor Perry Glanzer, to contribute to a series of essays entitled, “Advice to Christian [fill in the academic discipline].” Glanzer’s inspiration for the series...
COVID-19, Climate Change and Emergency Politics
What can the COVID-19 pandemic teach us about handling the climate crisis? Listen to this new podcast with Ingrid Rieser and her ‘Forest of Thought’ podcast. We’ve seen that governments have not hesitated to take bold action when faced...
Universities Should Help Break the Wall Between Facts and Values
Managing climate change and pandemics alike requires ‘values-first’ approaches to public policy development, not ‘science-first’ rhetoric. Read this new essay in the Times Higher Education. If you cannot access the pay-wall, the article is reproduced in full below. In...
Scotland, Awake! An Autocracy Awaits You
As I have repeatedly warned on this blog – ‘Mobilising for War’, ‘Sleepwalking into Totalitarianism’ – that it is much easier to declare an emergency than it is to end one, much easier for a state to appropriate powers...
