'Climategate': paradoxical metaphors and political paralysis

Climate scepticism in the sense of climate denialism or contrarianism is not a new phenomenon, but it has recently been very much in the media spotlight. When, in November 2009, emails by climate scientists were published on the internet without their authors’ consent, a debate began in which climate sceptic bloggers used an extended network of metaphors to contest (climate) science. This article follows the so-called ‘climategate’ debate on the web and shows how a paradoxical mixture of religious metaphors and demands for ‘better science’ allowed those disagreeing with the theory of anthropogenic climate change to undermine the authority of science and call for political inaction with regard to climate change

Media, metaphors and modeling: how the UK newspapers reported the epidemiological modelling controversy during the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak

The relation between theoretical models and metaphors has been studied since at least the 1950s. The relation between metaphors and mathematical modelling is less well researched. This article takes the media coverage of the foot and mouth modelling exercise in 2001 as an occasion to examine the metaphors of mathematical modelling that were proposed by the UK press during that time to make sense of this new scientific policy tool. One can detect a gradual change in metaphor use by the newspapers from conceptualizing modellers as detectives and models as mapping tools to modellers as soldiers and heroes, to modellers as liars and models as tools to distort the truth. This seems to indicate a shift in reporting from seeing models as a legitimate and "objective" basis used by decision makers to pursue science-based policies towards seeing models as tools used to legitimize increasingly difficult political decisions

Health, hygiene and biosecurity: tribal knowledge claims in the UK poultry industry

Since 1997 the world has been facing the threat of a human influenza pandemic that may be caused by an avian virus and the poultry industry around the globe has been grappling with the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1, or in more informal terms bird flu. The UK poultry industry has lived with and through this threat and its consequences since 2005. This study investigates knowledge claims about health, hygiene and biosecurity as tools to ward off the threat from this virus. It takes a semi-ethnographic and discourse analytic approach to analyse a small corpus of semi-structured interviews carried out in the wake of one of the most publicised outbreaks of H5N1 in Suffolk in 2007. It reveals that claims about what best to do to protect flocks against the risk of disease are divided along lines imposed on the one hand by the structure of the industry and on the other by more 'tribal' lines drawn by knowledge and belief systems about purity and dirt, health and hygiene

Fecal microbiota transplants: Emerging social representations in the English-language print media

open access articleThis study investigates how English-language news sources have represented fecal microbiota transplants (FMT). FMT involves transferring stool from a healthy donor to a recipient with a dysfunctional intestinal flora in order to repopulate their gut microbiome. FMT applications are increasingly moving into mainstream clinical care. We investigate press coverage of stool transplants, as well as broader themes associated with health and the gut microbiome, in order to uncover emerging social representations. Our findings show that print media focused in particular on creating novel, mainly hopeful, social representations of feces through wordplay and punning, side-lining issues of risk and fear. We also identify changing metaphorical framings of microbes and bacteria from ‘enemies’ to ‘friends’, and ways in which readers are familiarized with FMT through the depiction of the process as both mundane and highly medicalized

The greenhouse metaphor and the footprint metaphor: climate change risk assessment and risk management seen through the lens of two prominent metaphors

This article charts the emergence and framing of anthropogenic climate change as risk through the lens of two metaphors: greenhouse effect and carbon footprint. We argue that the greenhouse effect metaphor provided the scientific basis for framing climate change as a risk, indeed it can be seen as part of risk assessment. The carbon footprint metaphor, in turn, can be seen as belonging to the domain of risk management, as through this and other related metaphors, such as carbon offsetting, carbon budgets and the like, policy makers try to act upon the scientific risk assessment delivered by the greenhouse metaphor and encourage human behaviour change that reduces the risks of unmanaged climate change. We investigate how these key metaphors spread both in English news articles and in natural and social science articles and how they may shape current discourses and actions on climate change