Café Scientifique is a place where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology.
Meetings take place in cafes, bars, restaurants or even theatres, but always outside a traditional academic context.
The first Cafés Scientifique in the UK were held in Leeds in 1998. From there, cafes gradually spread across the country. Currently, some 70 cafés meet regularly to hear scientists or writers talk about their work and discuss it with diverse audiences.
Café Scientifique is a forum for debating science issues, not a shop window for science. We are committed to promoting public engagement with science and to making science accountable.
Our monthly meetings take place on the first Monday of the month at 7pm.
If you wish to be informed about future events, then please email one of the organisers and we will happily add you to our email list.
Meet the Organisers
Climate Change - finding a sustainable future in Scotland's past
Speaker: Dominic Hinde
Monday 3rd November 2025, 7pm
Waterstones Glasgow, Sauchiehall St, Glasgow G2 3EW
Come and join us at the Glasgow Café Scientifique for a talk & discussion about Scotland’s relationship with climate change and going ‘carbon neutral’. All welcome!
Scotland is a world leader in renewable energy but, behind the headlines and good news stories, what is actually going on? And where do ordinary people fit in to the debate? In this talk, journalist and sociologist Dominic Hinde blends his experience as an international news journalist and climate specialist with his academic work on the public communication of climate change and energy. Based on his new book Drifting North, written as a road trip through the Scottish landscape after the Glasgow COP summit and the Covid pandemic, he brings real people into the story of environmental and social change, from the beginnings of the carbon economy in Scotland into the future. Through visits to Shetland and Orkney, offshore oil platforms, nuclear reactors and wind farms, reforestation projects and urban sustainability initiatives, Dominic weaves together the personal, the national and an international to ask key questions, such as, “What are the driving forces behind the successes and failures of carbon neutrality?”, “Why is understand ‘energy’ essential to tackling climate change?”, and, “Why is it still so hard to mobilise mass action on climate?”
Dominic Hinde is a writer, journalist and academic at the University of Glasgow. He spent much of his twenties working as a Northern Europe correspondent and latterly an environment specialist for Scottish, UK and US news media, as well as writing for outlets in Germany and Sweden and working for Nordic radio and television. Since 2021, he’s been Lecturer in Sociology of Media at Glasgow, where he researches climate narratives, and continues to write for magazines such as the New Humanist and New Statesman, as well as being a contributor to Good Morning Scotland and producing independent radio documentary.
Note that to give our hosts some idea of how many people with be attending, they would appreciate it if you would fill in this online form:
