By Julian Cribb AM Fifty-five million years ago, the Earth took a fever. Somehow, 12,000 billion tonnes of carbon escaped into the atmosphere – and global temperatures soared by 5-8 degrees Celsius over the next few thousand years. What caused this event [i] is still subject to scientific debate, but a vast release of methane … Continue reading The Earth Strikes Back
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Idiocracy: is the decline in human intelligence undermining democracy?
The early 21st Century has been noteworthy for a marked increase in the number of governments willing to act against the interests of their electors – and the number of electors prepared to vote against their own best interests and choose such governments. Since an educated, thoughtful and responsible electorate is indispensable to any democracy … Continue reading Idiocracy: is the decline in human intelligence undermining democracy?
Time to end the mass killing
Many times larger than climate change and more deadly than Covid or war, humanity’s chemical emissions are the crisis nobody wants to acknowledge. It is the worst case of mass homicide in human history. Worse than World War II and the Holocaust, worse that World War 1, worse even than the great famines in China … Continue reading Time to end the mass killing
Choosing between national happiness – and global misery
With 30,000 wildfires blazing from one end of the Planet to the other on any single day, melting icecaps and glaciers, dying coral reefs, polluted oceans, lakes, rivers and cities, vanishing wildlife and forests and growing scarcity of water and soil, the fate of humanity is already plain to see. The missing element in our … Continue reading Choosing between national happiness – and global misery
Why we must clean up the Earth
Humans emit more than 200 billion tonnes of chemical substances each year, in a toxic avalanche that is injuring people and life everywhere on the Planet. Earth, and all life on it, are being saturated with man-made chemicals in an event unlike anything in the planet’s entire history. Every moment of our lives we are … Continue reading Why we must clean up the Earth
Our existential crisis: what is to be done?*
Quarter of a century ago, as a science writer, I began encountering a lot of rather depressed scientists. Every day they went to work and grappled with data showing that the Earth was falling apart. Species were vanishing at accelerating rates, poisons were spreading unchecked, the climate becoming more violent, oceans fouled and lifeless and … Continue reading Our existential crisis: what is to be done?*
Solving the mega-risks
By Julian Cribb Humanity’s capacity to inflict mass harm on itself has been accelerating exponentially since the mid-20th Century. It is rapidly approaching the point where it can bring down civilization and, quite possibly, eliminate our species. This is the greatest existential emergency of human history. In the coming decades it will determine whether we … Continue reading Solving the mega-risks
Why 2050 is too darned late…
By Julian Cribb Six million people are already dead, mostly because they and their governments did not act on sound scientific advice about Covid in sufficient time. The question of our Age is how many will die if governments the world over fail to act in time on: global heating, global poisoning, the global water … Continue reading Why 2050 is too darned late…
Food or War: is that the question?
Rather foolishly, when I set up my website some years ago, I wrote that I was thinking of writing a book provisionally entitled Food is a Key to Avoiding World War III. Life has intervened and I haven’t been able to do that. Now Australian author and science writer Julian Cribb has written a book that covers much of the ground I would have needed to. Food or War is not a jolly read. But it does end with a range of proposals to help humanity avoid what has been a recurring feature of human life – conflicts over food, land, and water leading to destructive wars. In this interview, Julian discusses the bleak history of the links between food and war and suggests what might be done to avoid them.
He outlines three key ways to avoid to conflicts over food, land and water and suggests how a…
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Diagnosing the American disease
Coronavirus originated in China, of that there is no dispute. But by the time it has run its course, it will be inevitably be known as The American Disease. While there is a great deal of finger-pointing and blame-laying in the US politicosphere and commentariat about whose fault it all is, the debate has almost … Continue reading Diagnosing the American disease
Surviving C21 