Latest articles on climate action
1.5° locked-and-loaded and looking down the barrel at >2°
Making molehills out of mobilisation mountains
What should have been no worse than a four-thousand-death epidemic is determinedly on its way to becoming an at-least-four-million-death pandemic—a cruel and unnecessary global demonstration of the nothing-to-see-here-folks instincts of bureaucrats and…
Democratic climate-action mobilisation or martial law
That which should have been one of the most influential books of all time ranks 302 209 places behind Nevil Shute Norway’s On the Beach in Amazon’s best sellers, speaks volumes. Comparing Shute’s fiction with Dr James Hansen’s non-fiction Storms of My Grand…
Every global thing to gain by taking coalition initiative
Messiah complex is a label few would wish have bestowed. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern would likely rather run a Walker mile than be portrayed as the one who sought to lead the world through the 2020– Pandemic, and through the increasingly unavoidable climate…
Last habitable landmass must lead covid–climate mobilisation
Last habitable landmass to emerge, and to be inhabited, Aotearoa, should now play to its strengths by demonstrating life after zero-carbon, and covid-19. New Zealanders have never been backward about being world-beating, whether sailing black-hulled America’s Cup yachts or…
covid-19 climate and bird-flu-strength-pandemic clarion call
Spain, officially, has had not quite 0.5% of its population infected by covid-19, about a third of the rate the maligned country experienced during the 1918 Pandemic. But 10% of those undeserving more than 230 000 people have died, and its economy is in its worst…
Yes Aotearoa can mobilise by example
As the epitome of physical distancing, Aotearoa is perfectly placed to lead the global project to survive the covid-19 pandemic, and anthropogenic global heating. In respect to climate, after petulantly insisting cop26 must proceed, on 1 April it was finally postponed…
Splendid self-isolation opportunity for civilisation
Having wasted two months of preparation time, the challenge for civilisation now is to break its determined habit of wasting every crisis in its entirety. Aside from abiding by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s succinct advice to act as though one had covid-19, and stay strictly…
Climate action of the people, by the people for the planet
That government of the people, by the people, for the people, has perished from the earth, has placed all earth’s creatures in existential peril. All too foreseeably, the half-billion creatures and counting destroyed by wildfire this globally-heated Australian summer will later…
Climate and democracy at the mercy of plutocracy
Epically ironically, salvaging a survivable climate and a free society possibly now depends upon a one plutocrat deposing another plutocrat, turned dictator. Far preferably, Republican Party senators would suspend self-interest for the survival and dignity of their once…
Low-hanging election-turnout fruit and silver bullets
It is more than semantics. In the thousand-year war to survive anthropogenic global heating, a magazine of silver bullets the size of the 59 000-hectare Hawthorne depot, Nevada, will be needed. However, regardless of the problem, received wisdom would…
Holy grails and silver bullets and day-and-half to vote
It’s long since time to jettison the obligatory if-we-don’t-act-on-climate-within-so-many-years exhortation. The truth is that, since 1988, when not only Dr James Hansen but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called for climate action, it has never been certain…
ipcc-understates-threat understatement
Bulletins proclaiming that the ipcc 1.5° report understates climate threat are literally understatements of epochal proportions. Self-reinforcing climate feedbacks already irreversibly underway signal civilization’s ever-growing greenhouse gas…
On the unspeakable ephemerality of beaches
Relying on economics to salvage a survivable climate is the 21st century equivalent of a standing down an army and leaving defence of the realm to wizardry. With the United States Senate summarily scuttling the Green New Deal, it might seem…
Near-certainty of 66-metre sea-level rise
Permanent ice sheets are a misnomer. Ages involving alternating glacial and interglacial periods are ephemeral, occupying only a small percentage of geological time. Humankind’s greatest—although certainly not in any laudatory…
Wasting storms of the grandparents
When Dr James Hansen published Storms of My Grandchildren nine years ago this December, he lambasted governments for greenwashing while doing nothing meaningful to curtail fossil-fuel use. But despite, by that time, having already seen his…