Climate Hope

Well, the Green party obviously, right? Not necessarily. While the Greens may score the best on environmental issues including climate change, the UK's weird electoral system makes things that much more complicated. There are two main issues you need to consider alongside what the parties are promising on climate change when choosing who to vote for: where you live, and what you want your vote to do. Once you factor these into your considerations, it’s a much murkier picture. First past the post I'll go through the voting permutations in a minute. But it's important to first recap the ground rules of the UK's very particular system. So, as briefly as possible, let's go back to school. The UK's electoral system is known as first past the post . That means the party with the most seats once the votes have been counted is invited (by the Queen; yes, really) to become the government. To determine the biggest party, the country is separated into con...

... a challenge to the organisation's new chair. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a problem with social science. It’s not that it doesn’t appreciate the social sciences; it says it does. It’s not that it doesn’t want to include social science in its reports; its fifth assessment report does just that. It’s that - despite its best intentions - it just doesn’t really understand social science's role in climate change research. This is more than an academic problem. As David Victor (a political scientist) argues in Nature , by shirking the most controversial and most interesting social science, the IPCC risks “becoming irrelevant”. The IPCC is due to appoint a new chair in October. It will need someone who not only appreciates social science research, but can help it overcome the the traditional science/social science dichotomy that continues to be played out across the pages of its reports. If it fails to do so, the continuation of its vital w...