Opinion

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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