Emily Cunningham

Good advice here, but I [respectfully] think this misses the point. The problem is #climatescience narratives - like many things in our society - are still dominated by white male voices. The RealClimate blog was/is entirely run by dudes. (1/2)https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/1138286453174210560 …

We need the dominant [white male] voices in the climate community to be allies and help more diverse communicators get a foothold, through social media, blogs, TV/print media, etc. (2/2)

A little history. One of the starting group was Amy Clement, but almost as soon as we got going, she was targeted by the most obnoxious troll (at the time) and with the pressures of being early career etc, decided this wasn’t going to be a good use of her time.

Over the years, I asked multiple women who contributed dozens of guest posts whether they wanted to have a more regular role. None did. Enthusiasm was easy to generate for one-off posts - but the ‘always on’ aspect of helping run it wasn’t as tempting.

The fact that there was constant low level sniping from the opposite trenches was definitely offputting to some, others simply had too many demands on their time already. Still others didn’t want to join something that already existed, preferring to start up on their own terms.

Over time, the overhead of running a blog decreased, the necessity for a single point of entry into climate blogging evaporated, and the benefits of being part of a collective effort diminished. So that ship sailed. I agree it was a shame and I take responsibility for that.

But it wasn’t through a lack of trying, and we did provide over a hundred diverse scientists with their first tastes of blogging.