Climate charity worker. Writer. “Can We Save the Planet?" out now https://t.co/6ziYSqgJIg. "Our Biggest Experiment", a history of the climate crisis, out in July.
Oct 16, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Finally got round to reading this report in full. It always feels odd to say this, but FUCK YEAH HOUSE OF LORDS COMMITTEES. Yes, people power is crucial to meeting the climate crisis. committees.parliament.uk/publications/3…
I know I should worry when House of Lords reports say stuff I've been banging on about for years (like needing to wee in the middle of the night or something?). In my defence, I read the HoL Science and Society report at a very impressionable age.
Jul 18, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
One of the hardest things about writing a book on the history of the climate crisis was reading people in the 1960s & 1970s warn, in a loose, far-off way, of “sometime after the year 2000” and how, if CO2 emissions weren’t tackled, it’d get dangerously warm.
They tended to express these warnings without urgency, (understandably, but still frustratingly) noting more immediate problems. They wanted to stress we had time still, and it wasn’t too late, which was fair, but the thing is, it also left that time open to to be stolen.
Dec 2, 2019 • 21 tweets • 6 min read
The UN climate talks have just started and I bet a load of people are thinking didn’t we just have those in New York a few months back, when Greta did that stare at Trump? So here’s a quick intro to WTF these talks are and how looooong they’ve been happening. (1/?)
They happen in a different country each year and have done since 1995. The first one was in Berlin. This one is formally hosted by Chile but got moved to Madrid at the last minute. Next year they are in Glasgow.
Oct 11, 2019 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
It’s lunchtime and I’m in a storytelling mood. Who wants to hear about an ancestor of Greta Thunberg, who did win a Nobel, back in 1903? He was a key figure in the history of the climate crisis, though his prize was nothing to do with that...
Svante Arrhenius was born in 1859, in Vik, in the South East corner of Sweden where his father managed land for the University of Uppsala.
Nov 2, 2018 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
In advance of the inevitable "Dorothy Hodgkin for the £50 note" campaign, a short thread on why the spats about it could be a lot of fun.
When Dorothy Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964, the Mail's headline was "Oxford housewife wins Nobel" (the Telegraph went for "British woman wins Nobel Prize – £18,750 prize to mother of three")
