Antinuclear

On Tuesday last week at RMIT in Melbourne, leading public intellectual and La Trobe University Emeritus Professor, Robert Manne launched our new book Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations. We are indebted to Robert for agreeing to launch our book, as he has been one of the most articulate and considered commentators confronting the issue of climate change and its poisoned political legacy.
Robert’s regular analyses of climate politics had a deep impact on my own thinking about the climate crisis. In particular, I remember having started the research that would result in our book back in 2010, reading one of Robert’s insightful analyses of the political impasse over climate change in The Monthly magazine during a trip to Europe. As the train hurtled through the countryside between Frankfurt and Amsterdam, I looked up from the article to see row upon row of wind turbines turning in the late afternoon sunlight…

Significantly positive
Human activities, most notably those causing increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide, are changing the climate. On the current trajectory of carbon emissions, very substantial climate are predicted by the end of the century.
If the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide has no knock-on effects, calculating the size of those changes would be straightforward. If we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial levels, the Earth’s temperature would eventually balance out about 1.2C warmer.

But reality is somewhat more complicated. Once the Earth begins to warm, it triggers other processes on the surface and in the atmosphere. These are climate feedbacks. “Positive” feedbacks will strengthen the warming, while “negative” ones will weaken it. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that the combined effects of all feedbacks is likely to be significantly positive.
Uncertainty around the…