How to use this guide. Posts are grouped by theme rather than chronology, drawing on work published between 2012 and 2026. Each post stands alone, but readers interested in the language and metaphor thread are encouraged to start with Section 1 and follow it through. Metaphor is never far away in any of these posts.
I have been interested in climate change and climate change communication for a long time, most recently as part of a Leverhulme Trust funded ‘Making Science Public’ programme of research (2012–2018). As part of this programme, we established a blog: the ‘Making Science Public’ blog. Since then, I have been blogging about climate change language and politics, climate change communication and culture, extreme weather and extreme weather communication and more. Global warming has turned to global heating and global boiling, something we all felt during the heatwaves of 2026.
In this anthology I trace some of the developments leading up to this point. I hope this is a useful summary of what has sometimes been called ‘climate linguistics’, focusing on issues of metaphor use in climate communication.
Section One
Climate Language, Metaphors and Framing
I have been fascinated by metaphors — the linguistic and cognitive instruments we use to make something unfamiliar familiar and to provoke action or inaction on climate change. The following posts trace changes in the linguistic framing of climate change and climate science: first, posts dealing more generally with language and metaphor; then specific terms and concepts; and finally metaphors used to talk about the contested field of ‘geoengineering’.
General
Apr 2012
An early and foundational post asking what ‘uncertainty’ means to ordinary people, and how that everyday meaning clashes with the technical uncertainty language of climate science. Drawing on corpus linguistics, it finds that ‘uncertainty’ carries strongly negative connotations in common usage (confusion, doubt, anxiety) and argues that translating scientific uncertainty into accessible language requires more than swapping terms for visuals or probability phrases. Written in the aftermath of Climategate, it makes the case that linguists need a seat at the table. (
Research published in 2026 seems to show that honesty about uncertainty builds trust.)
Dec 2012
The ‘climate cliff’ metaphor emerged simultaneously at COP18 in Doha and in US fiscal cliff debates in late 2012, spreading rapidly via Twitter and online media. The post explores how this new metaphor differs from older, slow-circulating ones like ‘greenhouse effect’: it was web-native, fast-born, and embedded in richly embodied journey-schema language — hurtling towards, falling off, peering over. An early reflection on how digital media was changing the speed, spread, and political connectivity of climate metaphors.
May 2015
Prompted by being named a ‘climate linguist’ in a news article, this post asks whether the field actually exists — and, finding I appeared to be its sole member, maps out what it might encompass: corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, metaphor studies, ecolinguistics, and social representations theory. I was of course not alone. Friends and colleagues Nelya Koteyko, Iina Hellsten, Rusi Jaspal, and Luke Collins were all founding members whose joint labour built the field.
Oct 2018
An investigation into the forensic metaphor cluster running through climate science communication: fingerprints, attribution, evidence, detection. Tracing the ‘fingerprint’ metaphor from scientific articles in the early 1990s through to media coverage around the 2018 IPCC special report, the post shows how the same metaphor operates differently in scientific and journalistic contexts. Resonates with the present moment when climate attribution science is maturing while the legitimacy of expertise is under sustained political attack.
Sep 2021
Written while still dealing with the aftermath of catastrophic flooding in my German hometown, this post examines the ‘language work’ embedded in IPCC reports: the calibration of uncertainty language, the shift in AR6 towards more forceful and plain expression, and the negotiations through which scientists decide how confidently to speak. Closes with a reflection on the role linguistics might play in future report-writing.
Jul 2022
Written while monitoring wildfires threatening relatives in New Mexico, this post revisits a decade of work on ‘carbon compounds’ alongside an expanding vocabulary of extreme weather words — weather bombs, atmospheric rivers, rain bombs, heat dome, wet bulb, flash drought. It tracks how the language of climate change has escalated from ‘change’ towards ‘chaos’, and reflects on how neologisms born of lived emergency are now accumulating faster than anyone can map them.
Jul 2023
A data-driven exploration of when climate-related terms — global warming, climate change, climate crisis, heatwave, extreme weather — first appeared in news coverage and when they began to accelerate, using Nexis data. Written during the heatwave of 2023, it traces a long arc from the 1970s to the present, noting how danger has colonised colour palettes once associated with hope and romance. Ends on a melancholy question: the climate has been speaking in ever louder words and images for decades; is anyone listening?
Dec 2023
A personal and playful end-of-year piece prompted by a dinner table moment: my son asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph about metaphor and climate change in my style, and the result — dripping in metaphors of scaffolding, tapestries, architects and mirrors — was both astonishing and instructive. The post reflects on two decades of climate metaphor research and on what it means for an AI to have absorbed and reproduced a scholarly style.
Mar 2025
A reflection on ‘compound weather’ — simultaneous or overlapping extreme weather events — as an emerging term that signals new awareness of complex climate-weather interactions. Drawing on earlier work on ‘carbon compounds’ with Nelya Koteyko, the post asks whether neologisms can speed up social change and public awareness. The answer, as ever, is somewhere in between: naming something is necessary but not sufficient for acting on it.
May 2025
Returns to the long-running research thread on ‘carbon compounds’ to examine a newer, more explosive addition: ‘carbon bomb’, used to describe massive fossil fuel extraction projects whose emissions would blow through Paris Agreement targets. Traces the term from around 2015 onwards and examines the entailments of the bomb metaphor — urgency, catastrophe, the possibility of defusal.
Aug 2025
Links to an article in the magazine Atmos in which I was interviewed about climate language and climate action. Drawing on close to two decades of research, I discuss how metaphors scaffold understanding and reflect responsibility; why familiarity matters alongside urgency; and what newer terms like ‘climate whiplash’ and ‘global weirding’ add to the discourse.
Terms and concepts; science and politics
Apr 2014
A close look at ‘adaptation’ as one of the three great concepts — alongside mitigation and geoengineering — that structure policy responses to climate change. Traces how ‘adaptation’ rose to prominence around the time of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report and the 2014 UK winter floods, and asks what it means in practice for communities and ecosystems.
Aug 2015
Written in the wake of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan announcement, this post examines ‘carbon pollution’ as the latest addition to the family of ‘carbon compounds’. Traces the term back to 1989 and asks whether Obama’s rhetorical intervention would shift the lexical landscape. After a change in American president, it mainly did not.
Sep 2015
An examination of ‘the pause’ — the alleged slowdown in global surface temperature rise between roughly 1998 and 2015 — as a linguistic and political phenomenon as much as a scientific one. Written with Mike Hulme and Warren Pearce, the post shows how this contested term became a weapon in the armoury of climate sceptics. A case study in how a single word can simultaneously describe a real scientific debate and be weaponised to delay climate action.
Dec 2015
A seasonal curiosity prompted by daffodils blooming in December 2015: where does the name ‘El Niño’ come from, and what does its religious etymology tell us about how weather phenomena get named and culturally embedded? Traces the term from 19th-century Peruvian fishermen through to its global scientific meaning today — a small masterclass in how names carry cultural history far beyond their technical referents.
Aug 2018
Prompted by media coverage of Will Steffen et al.’s ‘Hothouse Earth’ paper, this post traces the architectural metaphor family — icehouse, greenhouse, hothouse — through the history of climate science. It finds that ‘hothouse earth’ was already being used in 1990 following John Gribbin’s book of the same name, and that the issues raised then were identical to those raised now. The title says it all: the same arguments, the same warnings, the same failures to act, cycling endlessly.
Nov 2021
Written at COP26, this post examines ‘net zero’ as a concept that has shifted, in just a few years, from a hopeful framework for climate ambition to a term viewed with deep suspicion as a cover for delay. Asks how a concept can flip so readily between positive and negative associations. Looking back from 2026, it is clear that this ‘pejoration’ and polarisation of the term has deepened over time.
Sep 2022
A conceptual and metaphorical history of ‘tipping point’ in climate discourse, tracing the term from complexity theory through Malcolm Gladwell’s popularisation, Tim Lenton’s 2008 scientific article, to the 2022 McKay et al. update identifying up to fifteen active tipping elements. Along the way it unpacks the visual metaphors attached to the concept — leaning chairs, seesaws, fuses, snapping elastic bands — and asks what they reveal about how we imagine catastrophe.
Aug 2023
A rapid response to UN Secretary-General Guterres’s declaration in July 2023 that the era of ‘global warming’ was over and the era of ‘global boiling’ had begun. Examines the rhetorical force of this escalation and asks how it differs from earlier intensifications (‘climate crisis’, ‘climate emergency’, ‘climate breakdown’).
Jul 2025
A metaphorical excavation of ‘heat dome’, tracing architectural metaphors of the atmosphere from a 19th-century engraving of someone piercing the vault of the sky, through ‘greenhouse’, ‘blanket’ and ‘dome’, to current usage. Explores how spatial and structural metaphors shape what we think the atmosphere can do — enclosing, trapping, sheltering — and who or what has agency over it.
Geoengineering and metaphor
Jun 2013
One of the first posts in the blog’s sustained engagement with geoengineering, using Nexis data to track how the three great policy concepts have featured in news coverage since 1988. The findings are surprising: adaptation dominated from the very beginning, mitigation rose exponentially after 2006, and geoengineering barely registered. Raises the question of why one contested and speculative set of technologies receives so little public attention.
Jul 2013
Based on research with Rusi Jaspal analysing geoengineering coverage in trade magazines and UK newspapers between 1980 and 2013. Three master metaphors dominate: the planet as a machine to be fixed, as a patient to be healed, and geoengineering as a weapon in a war against climate change. Drawing on I. A. Richards and Suzanne Romaine, we argue that the metaphors we use for geoengineering are not neutral — they shape the world we will or will not choose to make.
Oct 2021
A decade-on revisit of 2011–12 research on geoengineering metaphors, asking what has changed and what has stubbornly persisted. The planet-as-machine, planet-as-patient, and war metaphors are still in circulation; but new voices have entered the debate, including a solar geoengineer comparing the intervention to chemotherapy. Ends on an unsettled question: is the repetition of the same metaphorical debates year after year getting us anywhere?
May 2025
The most comprehensive of the geoengineering metaphor posts, written in the wake of the UK government’s announcement of £56.8 million in ARIA-administered funding for geoengineering research. Spanning sixteen years and three major UK inflection points, it traces both what has changed (more urgency, more commercial interest) and what has not (the same machine, medical and war metaphors recycling through each new debate).
Jan 2026
The most recent instalment in the long-running geoengineering series. Homes in on ‘guardrails’ — the term used to describe governance frameworks for geoengineering research — and examines what this safety metaphor does: its implicit assumptions about control, risk management and the orderly navigation of dangerous territory. Asks whether the metaphors we use for controlling geoengineering are adequate to the scale of what is being contemplated.
Section Two
Extreme Weather, Fire and Floods
Extreme weather has been a recurring preoccupation of this blog since its earliest days — not only because the events themselves have become more frequent and more devastating, but because the language used to describe them has evolved dramatically. From early posts tracking ‘extreme weather’ as a rising phrase in news media, through the personal and political, to the metaphor-rich coverage of California wildfires and Valencia floods, this section traces both the events and the words we have used to describe them.
Mar 2014
An early and prescient post prompted by a single word — ‘truculent’ — used in an Observer article to describe Scottish island weather. From this linguistic starting point, the post asks whether extreme weather is becoming personified in new ways, examining the ‘weather on steroids’ metaphor that emerged during Hurricane Sandy. An invitation to observe the emerging metaphors of weather as barometers of changing public perception.
Jan 2013
The first in a long series tracking ‘extreme weather’ as a phrase in newspaper coverage, using Nexis data to show that unlike climate change discourse (which peaked around 2007 and declined), extreme weather talk was on a steady upward trajectory. Asks whether talking about extreme weather was becoming a surrogate way of talking about climate change.
Jun 2013
A follow-up using Nexis data and Google Insights showing that media talk about extreme weather continued to rise even as climate change coverage fluctuated. Written after a Met Office press conference at which Sir Brian Hoskins said ‘quite honestly we don’t know’ what caused recent strange weather patterns, it asks what it means for public understanding when scientists hedge and the media amplifies.
Jun 2015
Two years on from the original, this update revisits the Nexis graphs during a summer of heatwaves in India and Alaska, drought in California, and floods in Texas. The upward trend continues unabated. Ends with a prediction — that extreme weather talk and climate change talk are slowly converging — confirmed by a note added two years later.
Jun 2019
The third in the extreme weather talk series, written six years after the original. By 2019 the convergence of extreme weather and climate change discourse was clearly underway, and attribution science had given journalists new tools for linking specific events to background warming. A post that doubles as a longitudinal study — six years of watching language catch up with reality.
Jul 2021
✦ Also in Climate, Culture and Society
Written after catastrophic flooding in Western Europe, including my home village near the Eifel. The post steps back from corpus analysis and Nexis graphs to write about grief, disbelief, and the gap between knowing intellectually that climate change is happening and experiencing its consequences in places you love.
May 2022
A wide-ranging post written while monitoring wildfires in New Mexico threatening relatives, examining the expanding vocabulary of extreme weather: rain bombs, atmospheric rivers, heat domes, wet bulb temperatures. The title comes from the Chicken Little idiom and a phrase from a community elder at a New Mexico fire meeting — ‘the trees are crying’ — arguing that those who won’t listen to scientists might consider listening to the elders and the trees.
Jan 2025
Written in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic January 2025 Southern California wildfires, this post weaves together two threads: the growing body of work on the Pyrocene (the age of fire), and the simultaneous firestorm of disinformation and conspiracy theories that surrounded the disaster. Drawing on Payne, Zask, and Vaillant, it argues that danger comes not only from mismanaging fire but from the rise of ‘homo mendacem’ — lying man — whose wildfires of lies make organised response ever harder.
Jan 2025
A detailed analysis of the metaphors used by climate scientist Daniel Swain to explain the California wildfires: climate whiplash, the sponge, the atmospheric blow-dryer (the Santa Ana winds), and the ‘blizzard of a billion embers’ that swept through Los Angeles neighbourhoods. Drawing on Matlock, Coe and Westerling’s work on monster wildfire metaphors, the post argues that the best explanatory metaphors do two things at once: explain something complex and create a visceral feeling.
Apr 2026
A blog post introducing a peer-reviewed article by Nerlich and Jaspal published in Metaphor and the Social World (2026), analysing the metaphorical framing of the January 2025 Southern California wildfires. The article identifies two types of metaphorical mapping: one structuring how wildfire itself is described, and one structuring how disinformation about the fires spread — through fire metaphors applied to lies and rumour.
2026
Based on research with Rusi Jaspal comparing social representations of the 2024 Valencia floods and the 2021 German floods. The Valencia floods, which killed over 220 people in October 2024, generated both a torrent of monster-and-force metaphors and an extraordinary wave of solidarity as thousands of volunteers converged on the mud-filled villages. Asks what the contrast between destructive force and constructive community tells us about how societies respond to extreme weather.
Jun 2026
A witty and ironic post telling the tale of the 2026 heatwaves during which events that were supposed to be about organising climate resilience and talking about the climate emergency were cancelled due to extreme weather.
Section Three
Climate Politics, Scepticism and Denial
Climate politics has been a persistent thread through the blog since 2012, from the aftermath of Climategate through the scepticism wars of the mid-2010s to the more recent contestation of ‘net zero’ and the rise of disinformation. The posts in this section trace the rhetorical strategies of those who have sought to slow, dilute, or reverse climate action and the linguistic tools used both to attack and to defend climate science.
Jun 2012
One of the first posts I wrote, inspired by looking at ‘scepticism’ through the lens of what Goethe called ‘active scepticism’: one “which constantly aims at overcoming itself, and arriving by means of regulated experience at a kind of conditioned certainty”. This type of scepticism is diametrically opposed to the facile type that rejects all evidence that doesn’t suit certain biases.
Jan 2013
Written in the winter of 2012–13, when extreme weather dominated UK news coverage, this post argues that lived experience of unusual weather was beginning to outweigh the political damage of Climategate. Tracking public attention to Climategate against attention to extreme weather using Nexis data, it finds that the ‘weather frame’ was winning the public mind.
Feb 2013
A historical survey of the word ‘alarmist’ in climate discourse, tracing its use from 1980 to 2013. Finds that alarmist rhetoric and counter-rhetoric have been structurally entrenched in the climate debate since James Hansen’s 1989 Washington Post piece and Patrick Michaels’ response to it. Asks, with some scepticism, whether the deep rhetorical trenches of the climate wars can really be dismantled by an appeal to civility.
Apr 2014
A methodological post using Nexis data to visualise how public debate about climate change has ebbed and flowed since the late 1980s, with attention to the spikes associated with major IPCC reports, extreme weather events, and political controversies like Climategate.
May 2015
A reflection on the distinctive character of Australian climate scepticism, prompted by the Abbott government’s repeal of the carbon tax in 2014. Examines why Australia became an outlier in Anglophone climate politics and what it reveals about the relationship between fossil fuel interests, political culture, and the media ecosystem.
May 2015
Examines ‘lukewarmers’ — those who accept some human influence on climate but dispute the severity of projected impacts — as a distinct and strategically important position. The rhetorical function of lukewarmism: it allows adherents to claim scientific credibility while resisting the policy implications of mainstream climate science.
Sep 2015
Examines the military metaphors — wars, battles, fronts, campaigns — that pervade climate politics, asking what these belligerent framings do to the possibility of productive public debate, and whether the metaphor of war is ultimately self-defeating for those trying to build broad coalitions for climate action.
Oct 2015
Returns to the concept of ‘doubt’ through the lens of Bertrand Russell: “that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.”
Apr 2016
✦ Also in Climate, Culture and Society
Examines the confusion — sometimes genuine, sometimes manufactured — between scientific certainty and scientific consensus in climate discourse. Traces how ‘consensus’ became a contested term, with critics claiming appeals to consensus were a form of social pressure rather than scientific argument.
Aug 2017
A follow-up to earlier work on climate consensus, revisiting the debate in the light of new research and the changing political landscape of 2017 — the year of Trump’s Paris withdrawal. Examines how the consensus framing had evolved and what new arguments had entered the debate.
Nov 2017
Examines the rise of ‘climate realism’ as a counter-frame, promoted by those who claimed that alarmist messaging was counterproductive. Analyses the rhetorical move of claiming the ‘realist’ label and asks who gets to define what is realistic in climate communication.
Jul 2018
Written during the summer of 2018 — a summer of record heatwaves, wildfires, and drought across the Northern Hemisphere — this post asks whether the term ‘alarmism’ has finally lost its sting. When the climate is producing conditions scientists had warned about for decades, is expressing alarm still a rhetorical excess or simply a rational response?
Nov 2019
Written on the tenth anniversary of Climategate — the leak of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November 2009 — this post looks back at its long shadow. Examines what Climategate actually showed, what it was claimed to show, and how it was used as a rhetorical resource by climate sceptics for years afterwards.
May 2024
On the controversy surrounding cloud seeding in 2024, particularly in the wake of the Dubai floods and claims that cloud seeding had caused or exacerbated them. Examines how a real and contested technology became a vehicle for climate scepticism and conspiracy thinking.
Section Four
Science Communication and Public Engagement
How do you communicate climate change to a public simultaneously bombarded with information and resistant to changing behaviour? This question has run through the blog since its first post in 2012, and the posts in this section engage with it from multiple angles: rhetorical strategy, reception theory, the challenge of bushfire communication, and the new possibilities and pitfalls of AI-assisted climate communication.
Mar 2012
The blog’s first post on climate communication, examining the central conundrums: should communicators emphasise certainty or uncertainty, urgency or hope, global or local? Maps the competing schools of thought in science communication and asks whether there is any escape from the bind that almost any communication choice can be criticised as either alarmist or complacent.
Sep 2017
A methodologically novel post approaching climate communication through the lens of reception theory — the tradition associated with Jauss and Iser that foregrounds the active role of the reader in producing meaning from texts. Argues that climate communication is too often studied from the sender’s perspective.
Jul 2019
A stocktaking post written in the summer of 2019 — a year of school strikes, Extinction Rebellion, and record temperatures — asking whether the strategies recommended by communication researchers were adequate to the urgency of the moment. Ends with a degree of honest uncertainty: communication research can offer tools but cannot guarantee that anyone will use them.
Jan 2020
Written during Australia’s catastrophic Black Summer bushfires of 2019–2020, when Scott Morrison’s government was still resisting explicit links between the fires and climate change. Asks what happens when the political context of climate communication is actively hostile, and whether images of burning koalas and orange skies could do what words had failed to do.
May 2022
A reflection on the state of extreme event communication in 2022, reviewing recent work on attribution communication, risk framing, and the role of local versus global messaging. Asks whether the communication field has kept pace with the increasing frequency and severity of the events it is trying to explain.
Nov 2024
An exploratory post in which I put questions about climate change to several AI chatbots and reflect on the results. Neither a celebration nor a condemnation of AI in climate communication, but an honest attempt to understand what these tools do well and where they fall short (handling uncertainty, conveying urgency, adapting to context).
Section Five
Climate, Culture and Society
Climate change is not only a scientific and political phenomenon but a cultural one. It shapes and is shaped by fiction, art, health, memory, and the way communities understand their place in time and the natural world. The posts in this section range from climate fiction and cultural history to personal reflections, from the orange skies of Canadian wildfire smoke to the shrinking horizons of a changing world.
Jul 2012
An early meditation on the experience of unseasonable weather and what it does to our sense of the normal. Drawing on literary and cultural examples alongside news coverage, the post asks how weather that feels wrong — too warm, too wet, too early — shapes popular intuitions about climate change.
Aug 2012
A personal reflection bringing together thoughts on apocalyptic events like climate change and pandemics, and literary explorations of the apocalypse such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, published in 1826.
Jul 2014
An overview of the emerging genre of climate fiction (cli-fi) and its role in making the consequences of climate change imaginable. Reflects on the difference between dystopian fiction that provokes despair and fiction that imagines agency and adaptation, and asks what literature can do that science communication cannot.
Sep 2015
A post arguing that culture — shared values, narratives, and ways of making meaning — is not a peripheral factor in climate change but a central one. Drawing on Mike Hulme’s work and on social representations theory, it contends that how societies culturally understand their relationship to nature, risk, and the future shapes what they are willing to do about climate change.
Oct 2015
A reflective and somewhat elegiac post on what climate change does to our sense of the future. Drawing on the concept of temporal discounting and on cultural analyses of how societies imagine time, it argues that one of the less-discussed harms of climate change is the way it forecloses futures — shrinking the range of what can be anticipated, planned for, or hoped.
Dec 2015
A response to criticisms that climate fiction was alarmist and counterproductive, arguing that fiction operates by different rules from science communication: it is permitted to imagine worst cases, inhabit emotional extremes, and provoke rather than reassure. Asks whether the charge of alarmism levelled at cli-fi is a category error.
Apr 2016
✦ Also in Climate Politics, Scepticism and Denial
Also listed in Climate Politics, this post has a cultural dimension: it examines how religious rhetoric — appeals to faith, heresy, dogma — entered the climate consensus debate, asking what it means when the language of religion migrates into disputes about scientific authority.
Jul 2018
Prompted by frequent visits to eye casualty and dealing with air conditioning when suffering from severe dry eye syndrome. Air con is not only a signal but also an amplifier of climate change — a solution that is also a problem. We need to solve it for the sake of our health and that of the planet.
Jul 2021
✦ Also in Extreme Weather, Fire and Floods
Also listed under Extreme Weather, this post belongs equally in Culture and Society for its meditation on memory, place, and loss. The flooding of the Ahr valley — a landscape associated with holidays, family, wine, and a particular sense of German cultural life — becomes an occasion to reflect on what it means when the places that anchor personal and cultural identity are destroyed by events that we have, collectively, failed to prevent.
Sep 2023
Written in the summer of 2023, when wildfire smoke from Canadian fires turned the skies of New York and other eastern US cities an eerie orange, this post reflects on the cultural and aesthetic experience of a colour that has become a signifier of climate crisis. Orange — once associated with sunsets, harvest, warmth — now indexes danger, evacuation, and the Anthropocene.
Feb 2023
A post examining the long arc of warnings about the health consequences of climate change, from early public health research in the 1990s through to the Lancet Countdown and the increasing integration of health impacts into mainstream climate communication. Asks why health has been relatively slow to become a central frame for public engagement with climate change.
Outlook…
I started this anthology project in the middle of a second 2026 heatwave that affected much of Europe. Words like heat dome and wet bulb, whose emergence I had charted years ago, were becoming commonplace. Climate change was increasingly mentioned as a contributing factor to such heat waves, but generally after talking about records being broken, as if it was all about winning a race, and amid pictures of people having fun in the sun — at least at the beginning of the heatwave.
As the heatwave continued there was more discussion of air conditioning, its lack in Europe, its pros and cons, with the debate being gradually drawn into a new culture war and political polarisation instead of looking for the best ways of keeping people AND the planet cool and healthy.
Since 2012 I have seen many metaphors, from climate cliff to heat dome, come and go and I have recorded their use and misuse. And still the world is heating, and we are living in ever more extreme weather conditions. Climate change communication is still necessary and useful — we should never just stop talking about the climate and the weather — but there is now some desperation creeping in.