Hockey Stick: the first climate change metaphor

In his Public Understanding of Science 2000 article ‘Knowledge, Ignorance and Popular Culture’, University of Toronto Professor Sheldon Ungar suggests the reason that public understanding and concern could coalesce around the ozone hole, where it has failed to do so for climate change, was in part due to two things: first, that the ozone hole [...]

Censorship or sense? Well, sense actually

Well, that was interesting. My post on the limits to debate on cimate change has generated 40-odd comments so far (modest in the grand scheme, but detailed, and most of which has been useful and instuctive: couple of interesing sites in Devil’s Kitchen and QuestionThat). There were a few personal attacks here and here (and [...]

Climate change: how to balance freedoms

Thanks for all the comments so far. The post in reply, and new comments have moved on to the new post, over here.
******
Earlier this week, one of the key sceptical blogs, Jennifer Marohasy, re-listed a collection of quotes to do with scepticism, denial and free expression. There are pegs on which denial–denial, and not scepticism–finds [...]

C4 Mykura’s half-right contradiction on climate change

Hamish Mykura, Channel 4’s head of documentaries, has published his reply to Monbiot’s claim that Channel 4 has harmed action against climate change.
Mykura’s central tenet is that the vehemence of people such as Monbiot do more harm to the ’cause’ of global warming than a dissenting documentary that is seen by 2.7m viewers. In Mykura’s [...]

Third of Conservatives don’t accept climate change

Yesterday the Guardian published figures showing that a third of Conservative MPs don’t believe, or don’t know what they believe about, climate change. This on the same day that Gordon Brown gave the keynote speech to the Guardian’s ‘Climate Change Summit: how to beat Green Fatigue’ conference.
Writing in yesterday’s Guardian, Brown says climate change “is [...]