The film is worth your time. You won’t emerge a better person, but there are some laughs, some excellent performances and nostalgia for “The Rockford Files”. That’s a pretty good deal, I’d say. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are two men stumbling down mean streets in the ever-more-confusing and gritty (thanks to the pollution, both literal... Continue Reading →
University of Manchester’s Careers Service have just put on their tenth “Pathways” day for PhD students. There was free food (good), free entertainment (better) and free advice (best of all). There were 500 of us, and if there'd been a medical emergency, it would have been easier to shout out "“Is there someone who ISN’T a... Continue Reading →
Here's my performance in the University of Manchester final of "Three Minute Thesis." (Thank you very much to the organisers - and the training we received was fab). I did okay but on reflection, I tried to do too much - a history of climate science and policy, an explanation of issue lifecycle models, AND the Australian... Continue Reading →
Unless you've been in a coma on Mars, you'll have spotted that the Australian Government strong-armed UNESCO recently. They did this to keep the inconvenient-to-tourism fact that significant chunks of the Greater Barrier Reef is suffering coral bleaching out of a report on climate change and World Heritage sites. In yet another example of the... Continue Reading →
What follows is in no way an “official” (nor even necessarily entirely accurate) account of the two day event for PhD students at the Science and Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex. First off, thanks and congratulations to the 1st year cohort of students who organised it. The Monday started with brief opening... Continue Reading →
Punk isn't dead, and won't be while TV Smith can draw breath and hold a plectrum. Going on tonight's performance, that will be a good 25 years yet. Smith, who was there as a proper punk in the 70s, has the energy of a gobby gobbing 20 year old, but the skills and cynicism of... Continue Reading →
The future is here, and we are avoiding it. 2020 used to be the target year, by which we had done x and y and z. Sadly, we didn't do those things. A mix of complacency, distraction, stupidity and incompetence mostly explains that. So it goes. But this presents the happy shiny people (HSP) who... Continue Reading →
Reposted from Manchester Climate Monthly. Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre Manchester kindly agreed to a further interview. In this first part we discuss the outcomes of the recent UN climate conference in Paris, the reality of fossil fuel subsidies and the signal the Paris agreement may (or may not) send to big business... Continue Reading →
We'll get to the climate calamity in a second, promise. First, some remedial Greek mythology: Paris was “nice but dim”, and chosen to settle an acrimonious dispute between some powerful actors. He fell head over heels with a rather beautiful creature,full of promise(s). For a little while everything seemed fine, but sadly, relationships broke down,... Continue Reading →
An essay on hype, history, denialism and the fossil fuel lobby. I hope I am wrong, and that Paris is indeed the “turning point” it is being hyped as. It won't take us long to find out – two or three years, I reckon. Personally, I think it will run into the sand in much... Continue Reading →
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