I was idly watching the world go by on Bluesky around 25 September when I noticed a conjunction of several events that made me think about climate change communication yet again, and how bad things are at the moment.

On 24/25 September, an Extreme Weather conference (ExtremWetterKongress) was taking place in Hamburg, Germany, where a broad spectrum of lay and expert people discussed not only an observed acceleration in the warming of our planet, but also the disproportionately high rise in global temperatures over the last 18 years. At the same time, Daniel Swain, a Californian climate and weather scientist and communicator, warned that climate change is increasing the likelihood and severity of extreme weather types that already occur–bringing about a more intense variation on a familiar theme. But it is also expanding the range of what’s possible in new locations around the world.

On 24 September, U.S. President Donald Trump gave a speech at the United Nations General Assembly and said that “This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion […] All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.” While Trump talked about a ‘green scam’, the German tabloid Bild talked a day later about a ‘green fairytale’ in a headline for an article blaming job losses on electric vehicles.

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If you do sociology or, indeed, any social science whatsoever, you’ll come across the work of Erving Goffman. I have done too but never engaged with it as much as I should have done. This was brought back to me when I talked with somebody who once shared a taxi-ride with Goffman and chatted with him about his research. That somebody is my husband. He has never written down this story, so I offered him the opportunity to get some of it across in this blog.

I’ll first provide a quick overview of Goffman’s work and then hand over to my husband, David Clarke. After that, I say a bit more about Goffman and metaphors, as metaphors were, in a sense, his “tool of sociological analysis“.

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Alondra Nelson, a sociologist, STS scholar and expert on AI policy and ethics, recently published a letter in Science proposing that artificial intelligence (AI) should adopt the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) framework from genomics, an approach designed to put social concerns at the heart of technology governance. Nelson argues that meaningful community engagement must be central to ELSI for AI, not just peripheral. In this post, I use this letter as a springboard to deepen my reflections on potential linguistic and epistemic obstacles to public engagement with AI and to broaden discussions of human oversight, alignment and ethical decision making in AI. To continue reading this post, please follow this link

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A large group of scholars led by Cody Kommers and Drew Hemment at the Alan Turing Institute recently published a paper on ‘computational hermeneutics’. They mention Hans-Georg Gadamer and Wilhelm Dilthey, two godfathers of hermeneutics, and talk about situated meaning, ambiguity and the plurality of meaning. How intriguing, I thought.

The paper brought back memories of my past work on meaning and interpretation in general linguistics and the history of linguistics. It made me wonder whether modern thinking about computational hermeneutics and past thinking about context and meaning could inspire each other even more than one might expect from the paper?

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I have followed the emergence of recent developments in AI from the end of 2022 onwards, marked by the launch of OpenAI‘s AI chatbot ChatGPT. It’s now the middle of 2025 and a LOT has happened in this space. From being a niche and nerdy topic, AI has become a topic discussed across society.

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In one of my previous posts, I discussed a type of metaphor that I call ‘situational metaphor’. Such metaphors emerge spontaneously in a situation that presents an opportunity to make a witty, mostly satirical, comment.

Image: Wassily Kandinsky, Black and Violet, 1923

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Three things happened recently in my Bluesky timeline which made me think about the fate of science communication. In this post I’ll use these brief glimpses into science communication activities, science communication research and government science communication to reflect on how science communication might change, especially in the United States.

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The post From dissemination to firefighting: The new reality of science communication? appeared first on Making Science Public.

Since around 2016, the year I retired, I have followed the blossoming career of another University of Nottingham academic, Angus Davison, a professor of evolutionary genetics and expert on snails and a science communicator. He became famous in 2016 when he began to write and broadcast about ‘Jeremy the lonely lefty snail’, a snail with a left-spiralling shell, that died in 2017, leaving behind a musical ballad as well offspring for further genetic analysis.

Jeremy was a snail that went viral and with it work on the genetic underpinnings of body asymmetry. Science fact and science fascination came together in the right political context to spark some great science communication.

Now, nearly ten years later, Angus’s fascination with snails has not diminished and he is now working on a different species, not plain old brown garden snails (ok, I don’t want to diss them, some are really pretty), but on the spectacular Cuban Polymita land snails or ‘painted’ snails which come in the most fantastic stripes and colours.

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The other day I was talking with a friend and moaning about writer’s block. My friend said: “You are into words and metaphors and stuff. What’s one small language puzzle that’s been nagging at you lately?” I blurted out: ‘vibes’. My friend replied: “Write about that then”.

Lots of people have written about that word recently, especially it seems about ‘the politics of vibes’, but haven’t perhaps engaged in what one might call conceptual history. So, in this post I’ll sign-post some stages in the semantic development of that word as it has shifted from music to feelings to politics, from ‘good vibes, man’ to ‘vibes-based voting’, mirroring profound changes in culture and society.

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As you know, I am now gradually moving from my old ‘Making Science Public’ blog home at the University of Nottingham to my new personal blog home here. This wasn’t easy and lots of people supported me directly or indirectly in this move (by listening to my whining). You know who you are, and I thank you all!

This new incarnation of the ‘Making Science Public’ blog has been born into a world full of conflicts, controversies, confusion and chaos. On one side of the Atlantic science and science communication are defunded; on the other side of the Atlantic funding is increasing but science, science communication, science writing and science journalism still face mounting challenges. On both sides of the Atlantic climate change is making itself felt through an increase in extreme weather events, while doubts about the reality of climate change are still being circulated.

On both sides of the Atlantic more and more people are opposed to or hesitant about vaccinating themselves or their children against preventable illnesses like measles. On both sides of the Atlantic dis- and misinformation, as well as conspiracy theories, are on the rise. Science communicators have for a long time stressed that it is important to talk not only about scientific ‘facts’ but even more so about the scientific ‘process’ which includes questioning and uncertainty as essential elements.

However, as a leading science journalist, Kai Kupferschmidt, has recently pointed out, “the pandemic shifted many people’s idea of how science works, leading them to question things that are actually on much firmer ground on the spectrum of certainty”. This poses new challenges to science and science communication, especially in a world where knowledge and truth are devalued. And not only that. Science communication faces real pressures from algorithmic manipulation and information pollution accelerated by advances is artificial intelligence. What does all this mean for my blogging?

Is it all doom and gloom?

I started blogging in 2012 as part of a programme of research on science and politics funded by the Leverhulme Trust that ended in 2018. Our research programme was book-ended by discussions about post-BSE trust crises and debates about (the death of) expertise. While these challenges persist and the politics of openness (proposed as a remedy) has become an even thornier issue over time, new forms of citizen science, participatory research, and collaborative approaches to tackling complex problems have emerged. Open access publishing has expanded, and the sharing of data and preprints has become standard practice.

Scholars all over the world have also developed better tools for studying science-society interactions; there are more diverse voices in science communication; and there is growing recognition that public engagement is essential, not optional. The study of the causes of misinformation and disinformation, including conspiracy theories, are increasing alongside recommendations for mitigation.

The concept of ‘responsible research and innovation’, which I explored in many of my blog posts, has evolved from an academic ideal to a practical necessity, with real policies and funding mechanisms supporting it. And finally, young science communicators are developing innovative approaches that reach audiences that traditional channels never could – and blogging as one of these channels is not quite dead yet.

I hope that public curiosity about science and interest in science communication will endure; that, despite all the challenges and obstacles, conversations between science and society continue to grow; and that this blog can contribute to these conversations in the future.

(This post can now be found here)

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