The figure above presents twitter traffic for #peoplesclimate, #ActOnClimate, and any tweets with the term "climate" for the past month--from 31 August to 30 September 2014.   The People's Climate March and the UN Climate Summit increased attention on the issue to record levels up to 200,000 tweets during the March.  These levels are significantly higher than during other climate events in 2014.  For example, the National Climate Assessment pushed twitter traffic up to almost 80,000 tweets and President Obama's Clean Power Plan announcement peaked at 50,000 tweets (see earlier posts below for details on these figures).  Since the Summit ended last week, overall coverage of the climate issue on Twitter has gone back to previous levels below 50,000 posts a day.  

--Dana R. Fisher, drfisher@umd.edu

Photographer Nick Bowers’ exhibit Scared Scientists demonstrates, in stark black and white contrast, the reactions of scientists to the empirical truths of climate change. Bowers’ exhibit links these barefaced images of apprehension with the individual fears of each scientist. The future in these faces is a bleak one, marked by “SPECIES EXTINCTION” and “GLOBAL CATASTROPHE.”*  It’s a dark and effective warning against ignoring the evidence behind climate change and ecological degradation.

I don’t want to discuss climate projections or the repercussions of climate change here, because that conversation is a much larger one that is still going on in labs and communities all across the world. I also don’t want to debate the causes of climate change, or the contribution that human activities make to the process, because those issues reached consensus long ago. Instead, I want to focus on the role that fear—particularly, fear from scientists—plays in the climate change policy debate.

If the question is why scientists are the best subjects for this kind of exhibit, then the most obvious answer is in their expertise. Scientists are the people with the best information. If the experts are afraid, shouldn’t we all be?

September 10, 2014:  Philip Leifeld, Post-Doctoral Fellow,  EAWAG, Department of Environmental Social Sciences, SWITZERLAND, "A Conversation about Transboundary Water Politics in Europe"

September 24, 2014:  David Tindall, Associate Professor of Sociology University of British Columbia, CANADA. “Structural Location Within An Environmental Organizational Field and Individual Concern About Climate Change.”

October 8, 2014: No workshop

October 22, 2014:  John Steinbruner, Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Center for International and Security Studies, University of Maryland, College Park Maryland. “The Security Implications of Global Warming.”

November 5, 2014:  Sean Downey, Assistant Professor of Ecological Anthropology, University of Maryland, College Park Maryland, “Analyzing the emergence of a complex swidden management system in the Toledo District, Belize.”

November 19, 2014:  David Ribes, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Culture, and Technology (CTT) Georgetown University, Washington D.C.  “Anthropos in the City: An Historical Ontology of Urban Ecology.”

December 3, 2014:  Rianna Murray, Ph.D. Student in Toxicology and Environmental Health Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health (MIAEH) School of Public Health, University of Maryland College Park Maryland, “The Anacostia River, Recreation, and Health: Is there an Association Between Limited-Contact Recreation and Adverse Health Outcomes?”