At Last: The Political Left Speaks Out
As the old adage says, ‘Better late than never’. I think of this in relation to a number of commentaries and essays that have appeared in recent days from the political Left, that at last begin to see the...
Essays & Blog Posts
Choose Carefully Your Analogies for Communicating the Challenges of Climate Change
Among the media coverage of last week’s COP26 meeting in Glasgow one particular analogy stood out to me. It claimed that the Glasgow Climate Pact was a failure by analogy of having a 2 metre chasm to jump across...
How to Frame Climate Change
This interview for the ‘Sustainability Agenda’ podcast with Fergal Byrne covers my expectations for COP26, the role and importance of the COPs in general, and the dangers of an overly scientific approach to climate change– a reductionist framing of...
Preventing Future School Closures
Earlier this year I wrote a blog post here titled, ‘Re-socialising a vaccinated world requires political struggle‘. I am pleased to draw attention to one small success in such a struggle, which in this case is to make it...
‘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 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...
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...
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...
