The Sacrament of Creation: What Can We Expect from Pope Francis’s Ecological Encyclical?
Pope Francis has made no secret of his conviction that human-induced climate change, along with other forms of environmental degradation, represents a grave threat to humanity’s future. At times he even speaks in quasi-apocalyptic terms: “Let us not allow omens of destruction and death to accompany the advance of this world!” His forthcoming “ecological encyclical” […]
Geoengineering is no place for corporate profit making
“Save the world and make a little cash on the side.” That’s the motto of Russ George, the colourful entrepreneur behind Planktos Science who wants to put geoengineering into practice now. George is convinced that by adding iron sulphate to the oceans, he can stimulate plankton blooms and so suck enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to […]
Geoengineering might work in a rational world … sadly we don’t live in one
The publication of a hefty two-volume report on geoengineering by the US National Research Council represents a marked shift in the global debate over how to respond to global warming. To date, the debate has been about mitigation, with the need for some adaption because of the failure to reduce emissions adequately. The new report, backed by […]
The Risks of Climate Engineering
The Republican Party has long resisted action on climate change, but now that much of the electorate wants something done, it needs to find a way out of the hole it has dug for itself. A committee appointed by the National Research Council may just have handed the party a ladder. In a two-volume report, […]
Will China Save the World, Or Destroy It?
China’s greenhouse gas emissions now surpass the combined total of the United Sates and the European Union. When measured on a per person basis, the average Chinese is responsible for more damage to the climate than the average European. The gaps will become wider. Unless China soon stops and reverses the rampant growth of its […]
The Anthropocene: Too Serious for Post-Modern Games
In his post “Against the Anthropocene”, Kieran Suckling makes two main arguments. The first is that the choice of “Anthropocene” as the name for the new epoch breaks with stratigraphic tradition; he feels uncomfortable with a change in tradition, not least because he suspects the break reflects a hidden political objective. The second is that […]
Ecologists Butt Out: You Are Not Entitled to Redefine the Anthropocene
Why is it that some of those who publish scientific papers about “the Anthropocene” have such a profoundly mistaken understanding of what the concept means? And why do referees and journal editors let the papers through? I was exasperated by this again on reading another paper on the starting date controversy, this one titled “The […]
When Earth Juts Through World
With the arrival of the Anthropocene we must now be suspicious of all ideas developed in the last 10,000 years, including James Lovelock’s notion of Gaia which, it turns out, is a child of the Holocene. The Anthropocene is a reversion to the unruly and chaotic conditions before the Holocene’s 10-millennium epoch of calm. Now […]
Gaia Does Not Negotiate
Gaia Does Not Negotiate A contribution to “The Situation Facing the Moderns After the Intrusion of Gaïa: A Philosophical Simulation”, the final evaluation conference of the project An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) Amphitheatre Caquot, Sciences Po, Paris, July 28-29, 2014 by one of Gaia’s Chargés d’Affaires invited to a diplomatic workshop. Gaia does […]
The New Environmentalism Will Lead Us To Disaster
The New Environmentalism Will Lead Us To Disaster So-called ecopragmatists say we can have a “good Anthropocene.” They’re dead wrong. Clive Hamilton Published in Scientific American, 19 June 2014 Fourteen years ago, when a frustrated Paul Crutzen blurted out the word “Anthropocene” at a scientific meeting in Mexico, the famous atmospheric chemist was expressing his […]