Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Republic of Maldives, in The Guardian today:
'In a grotesque Faustian pact, we have done a deal with the carbon devil: for untold fossil fuel consumption in our lifetime, we are trading our children's place in an earthly paradise. Today, the Maldives will opt out of that pact ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Juliet Jowit and Robin McKie on "climate fatigue" in The Observer:

'Analysts say few people are taking action to deal with the threat of climate change, although over the past 12 months the vast majority have come to accept that it poses a real threat to the world. Opinion polls reveal much confusion among the public about what Britain should do to ( Read more... )

Joseph Romm, "Desperate times, desperate scientists" in Salon:
'Because of Bush's refusal to act seriously on greenhouse gas emissions, coupled with the accelerating reality of global warming, the future is fairly easy to predict. Either the next president makes enacting a national emissions reduction plan his or her top domestic priority -- and ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

1. Alfonso Cuaron in the Guardian arts blog:
"I have a huge appreciation of backgrounds. What I have a problem with is borders. The language of cinema is cinema itself: it doesn't matter whether it is filmed in Spanish or English or French or Japanese. The same goes for the people who make it. Yes, I'm a film-maker from Mexico. But I also belong to ( Read more... )

It's raining, and the sound is incredibly beautiful, the pitter-patter on corrugated roofing over Puccini on my radio. Not least because it means that I won't have to go around with a watering can reviving the plants tomorrow.

~

Acclaimed scientist, explorer, and conservationist Tim Flannery was this evening named 2007 Australian of the Year. An ( Read more... )

Tim Flannery's column in today's The Age:

"If climate change is the cause of this drought, then it is no drought at all, but a manifestation of the new climate. Yes, things might get wetter again, but as long as the pollution persists things will never go back to what they were in the 1970s.

"This realisation gives resonance to Professor Peter ( Read more... )

The stuff you end up reading for a philosophy course on environmental sustainability... *whistles* I'd never felt so unmoored in any subject before. There is such an overabundance of literature, and the debate is so heated and fast and dynamic - because of its newness as a topic and because of the urgency which all its theorists and commentators ( Read more... )

• The Nation: Heat Wave
  Peter Canby, senior editor for The New Yorker, reviews two books on global warming, Elizabeth Kolbert's "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" and Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers".
  But in many ways, the most striking thing that emerges from reading these two books and indeed from contemplating the larger phenomenon of global ( Read more... )