Abbott and co can’t ignore climate change forever

Published on The Drum, ABC, 26 August 2013 Six years ago, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was 90 per cent certain that human activity was the main cause of climate change. That percentage has since risen to 95, according to a new draft report leaked last week. Try as climate deniers might, they can’t […]

Suspending democracy: who says?

I have never called for democracy to be suspended. So why is this meme prevalent on the Internet? Why is it that whenever I write anything about climate change some commenters feel obliged to wheel it out as if it invalidates everything I say? Here is the explanation. For many years I have been giving […]

It’s time to disconnect from techno-fetishism

When the computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov it seemed to many that we had crossed a threshold. By beating us at our most complex intellectual task, man had at last been defeated by a machine. Kasparov’s defeat prompted anguish from those fearful of the colonizing power of the machine world. Newspapers […]

Geoengineering: Our Last Hope, or a False Promise?

published in the New York Times, 21 May 2013 Geoengineering: Our Last Hope, or a False Promise?  Manipulating the planet could be perilous. Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, is the author, most recently, of “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering.”  We should not try to play […]

Moral haze clouds geoengineering

Published in the EuTRACE Journal, April 2013 Will researching geoengineering ease pressure on governments to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions? The suspicion that it will explains why many people feel nervous about the whole climate engineering enterprise. To counter this fear, geoengineering researchers and supporters frequently say that more information is always a good thing, […]

No, we should not just ‘at least do the research’

Published in Nature, 10 April 2013 The idea of applying geoengineering research to mitigate climate change has not been thought through, argues Clive Hamilton. Fresh concerns about using geoengineering projects to cool the planet emerged late last month, when scientists at the UK Met Office said that possible unintended consequences demanded global oversight of such schemes. […]

Why geoengineering has immediate appeal to China

Published by The Guardian, 22 March 2013 Beijing wants to cut emissions without hindering growth and avert a revolt from a population under extreme climate stress The political dilemma over geoengineering – deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system designed to counter global warming or offset some of its effects – will perhaps be most […]

Climate Change Signals the End of the Social Sciences

In response to the heatwave that set a new Australia-wide record on 7 January, when the national average maximum reached 40.33°C, , the Bureau of Meteorology issued a statement that, on reflection, sounds the death knell for all of the social sciences taught in our universities. “Everything that happens in the climate system now”, the […]

ASIC and the Great Coal Hoax

Will anti-coal activist Jonathan Moylan receive justice if he is charged over his hoax? ASIC, which will formally interview Moylan next week, is under enormous pressure to “make an example” of the 24-year old. It is expected he will be charged with breaching Section 1041E of the Corporations Act, which outlaws false and misleading statements […]

Australia Burns

by Clive Hamilton, Alex Doherty published by New Left Project 15 January 2013 As Australia suffered a record breaking heatwave, David Jones of the Australian Bureau of Meterology remarked that ‘‘Clearly, the climate system is responding to the background warming trend. Everything that happens in the climate system now is taking place on a planet […]