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The beginning of this week saw the press respond (or not) to Lord Adair Turner’s new report on reducing our UK carbon emissions as part of his role as chair of the government’s Committee on Climate Change. Taking a snapshot (or synchronic, to use the technical term) analysis of the coverage of the report [...]

James Hansen, NASA scientist, is in Westminster today to give evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee on the impact of current science on climate policy. It’s being billed by new group Climate Safety as “one humdinger of a debate” between, in the red corner, Hansen and researcher Tim Helweg-Larsen of the Public Interest Research Centre, [...]

Energy company (didn’t they used to be an oil company?) Shell are running a series of web dialogues, with today’s (6am GMT time, unfortunately they are not supplying the coffee) on ‘Sustainability Communications’ with their V-P for Comms, Björn Edlund.
Early skirmishes between the Comms team and the great unwashed (it is 6am) remind [...]

Last Friday I attended the first of seven ‘climate change and violence’ 1-day workshops attended by a network of academics, campaigners, government and faith groups (and others) interested in looking at climate change in a holistic manner, rather than from segregated disciplines or policy positions. The network is called Crisis Forum, set up and [...]

One of the most arresting case studies in Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News, about the ‘churnalism’ of poor reporting/stories that is sweeping through the journalism industry as the result of its commercialisation, is about Y2K - the millennium bug.
Davies successfully shows how a ‘non-story’ fed itself, both politically and in the press, until [...]

On this fine morning for democracy, something to warm the hearts of the Green Party, and its leaders and principal speakers, Caroline Lucas and Derek Wall. This story in The Times from Monday:
Cleverer children are more likely to vote for the Green Party or the Liberal Democrats in a general election than other parties when [...]

Last week, an anthropology PhD student in New Zealand wrote a summary and response to a paper I gave at the Association for Journalism Education annual conference, in September this year. I though her commentary was a thoughtful piece with a fair set of conclusions: that bloggers self-select their networks based on beliefs. And that [...]

Today is blog action day, and this year’s theme is poverty.
As for La Marguerite, one of my favourite personal/public blogs on climate and human responsibility, I was thinking of blogging something close to home, maybe climate related. But much of the thought process at the moment is around writing a critical incident diary for my [...]

Headline coverage of climate change in the UK national press has dropped by over 40% since May 2007.
In May 2007, 103 headline stories in the top 20 UK newspapers carried either ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ or ‘Kyoto Protocol’ in the title. In May 2008, that figure had dropped to 59.

One month’s statistics could be [...]

Research for my PhD took us last weekend to the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg and an exhibition of the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The Japanese-born New Yorker Sugimoto has been exhibiting since 1987 and is recognised as one of the outstanding contemporary photographers. Contemporary, but using almost archaic photographic equipment and practices, [...]