forgot already ...

must be the eFAD kickin' in :-)
but what I really want to look at is Clive Hamilton & his new book.
Up, Down, Appendices, (where this actually began).

... my purpose here is just to collect & organize some of the considerable web presence around Requiem For A Species and this fellow Clive Hamilton, which effort will be ongoing:

himself:   the book:   reviews:   videos:   articles:   miscellaneous:

himself:

his website & some links to his books, articles, speeches &etc. which, if it was up to snuff ... well, if it was up to snuff this post would not be here :-)

 

bio at ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

 

Wikipedia with a list of his books.

 

Higgins (Melbourne Australia) by-election December 5 2009.

 

certain details are important, in my realm at least, Wikipedia fails in this instance - but - a wife and some 'adult children' are reported here and there on the www, and he was born in 1953 he tells me.

 

the book:

*** Earthscan (British & North American publisher): Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change - this site has good links including: to a blog by the author, reviews, videos &etc. If it had been so good when I started I probably wouldn't have :-)

 

Allen & Unwin (Australian publisher, & New Zealand & South Africa): Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change.

 

in Canada it looks like Amazon dot com or nothing: Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change.

 

Are we all climate deniers?, introduction by himself, April 16 2010.

 

The “Oh shit” moment we all must have, the 'inspiration' (as it were), April 27 2010.

 

excerpt: Preface (%$#! pdf) seems to be missing the last two paragraphs (?)

 

excerpt: Preface at OurWorld 2.0 United Nations University, April 12 2010, with the last two paragraphs, and with a remarkable image of Alexandre Kolinka's flying sculpture.

 

excerpt at The Guardian.

 

Quickie Video (YouTube 1 min.).

 

reviews:

by Graham Strouts, June 7 2010.

 

by Chris Saliba, June 4 2010.

 

Money Begets Environmental Evils, Study Finds, Stephen Leahy, June 3 2010 (book mentioned).

 

Book of the week, Steven Yearley, June 3 2010.

 

Clive Hamilton: 'solving climate change is out of the question', interview with Tom Levitt, May 28 2010.

 

Bring on the locusts!, review by Tim Black, May 28 2010.

 

Facing the truth can be hard, Byron Smith, May 25 2010, which I found via On Facing The Truth About Climate Change, posted by Christine at 350 or bust, and which was how I found the book at all, thanks Christine :-)

 

by David Robertson, May 24 2010, (novel? doh!?).

 

"... tell me I'm not dreaming, but are we out of time?", Simon Goldsmith, May 17 2010.

 

by Mairi Jay, May 16 2010.

 

'Requiem for a Species' author examines psychology behind inaction, skepticism on climate change, Laurie Goering, May 14 2010.

 

by Adair Jones, April 25 2010.

 

by Jonathan Foye, April 22 2010.

 

by Cameron Douglas Shingleton, April 7 2010.

 

by Anonymous at Open Intelligence, April 5 2010.

 

Comment After Copenhagen, Robert Manne, March 2010.

 

by Florian Kaefer, March 30 2010.

 

Globally warned – review of Hamilton and Hansen, Tony Kevin, March 28 2010.

 

Clive Hamilton and the Global Change Institute: It’s all in your head, Alicia Crawley, March 27 2010.

 

by Bryan Walker, March 24 2010.

 

by Bryan Walker, March 20 2010.

 

by Peter Donoughue, March 14 2010.

 

by Mark Rubbo at Readings, March 1 2010.

 

Too late for all but prayers, The hope-free zone, Kelsey Munro, February 27 2010.

 

videos:

2010/05: Have we been conned? Part 1 Tim Flannery, Ross Garnaut, Bill McKibben, Clive Hamilton (SlowTV 30 min.); Part 2 Clive Hamilton, Panel Discussion (25 min.); Part 3 Panel Discussion, Questions (25 min.)

 

2010/05: Facing up to Climate Change (YouTube RSA 1 hr. 38 min.)

 

2010/03: 'Requiem for a Species' book launch at ANU / Australian National University (YouTube 54 min.)

 

2010/03: Is it too late to prevent catastrophic climate change?; RSA is the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (YouTube 1 hr. 38 min.)

 

2009/12: at Save Solar Systems Meeting Part 1 (YouTube 10 min.); Part 2 (9 min.): poor quality recording from just before the Higgins election, but a little insight into what he looks like when he is not reading a prepared speech; some details of the Save Solar Systems campaign.

 

2009/11: AYCC Higgins Interview (YouTube 8 min.); AYCC is the Australian Youth Climate Coalition.

 

2009/09: Growth fetishism and the climate crisis Part 1 (SlowTV 30 min.); Part 2 (28 min.)

 

2009/09: Climate change denialism Part 1 Clive Hamilton (SlowTV 30 min.); Part 2 Andrew Glikson (23 min.); Part 3 Questions (24 min.)

 

2008/08: The Freedom Paradox Part 1 (SlowTV 23 min.); Part 2 (26 min.)

 

2008/06: Consumerism, Self-Creation and Prospects for a New Ecological Consciousness Part 1 (SlowTV 25 min.); Part 2 (22 min.)

 

2008/06: Art Censorship public forum Part 1 Introduction, Ian Howard, Tony Bond (SlowTV 29 min.); Part 2 Hetty Johnston and Julian Burnside (25 min.); Part 3 Clive Hamilton, General Debate (31 min.); Part 4 Questions (29 min.)

 

2008/03: Dear Mr Rudd: Climate Change. Clive Hamilton and Robert Manne Part 1 (SlowTV 21 min.); Part 2 (21 min.)

 

articles:

We stand by meekly as the rich greedily assert their power, June 14 2010: What is absurd about the situation is not that the rich behave without conscience and continue to feel deprived as they sit atop mountains of wealth, but that we no longer laugh at them.

 

The Return of Dr Strangelove, June 2010: The politics of climate engineering as a response to global warming.

 

Victoria still talking to controversial geoengineering scientists, June 10 2010: 'Victorian government' & 'Brumby government' refer to the Australian state of Victoria and John Brumby the current Premier.

 

Acting from a force of habitat, exchange between Tom Switzer and Clive Hamilton, June 5 2010.

 

Series on Climate Denial:
Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial, 22 February 2010.
Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying?, 23 February 2010.
Think tanks, oil money and black ops, 24 February 2010.
Manufacturing a scientific scandal, 25 February 2010.
Who's defending science?, 26 February 2010.

 

Copenhagen’s nasty negotiations, December 21 2009.

 

History's long shadow, 21 December 2009: There was a sense at the Copenhagen climate conference that we were witnessing, not so much the making of history but, the ending of it.
Don't undersell Copenhagen deal: Flannery, 19 Deccember 2009: ... if I was to sum it up in a single phrase I'd say this has been a good, successful meeting.

 

Six Degrees of Apocalypse, Recent Books about Climate Change, October 2008: Marian Keech, Sananda, & Leon Festinger; Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action, David Spratt & Philip Sutton; Fixing Climate: The Story of Climate Science And How to Stop Global Warming, Robert Kunzig & Wallace Broecker; The World without Us, Alan Weisman; Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, Mark Lynas; Quarterly Essay 31, ‘Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?', Tim Flannery; September report to the federal government (?), Ross Garnaut; Climate Wars, Gwynne Dyer; States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Stanley Cohen; The Road, Cormac McCarthy; The World without Us, Alan Weisman; 2007 assessment of the security implications of climate change for Australia (?), Lowy Institute.

 

miscellaneous:

Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends, Kevin Anderson & Alice Bows, November 2008.

 

Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias, Jules & Maxwell Boykoff, Nov 2004.
Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press, Maxwell & Jules Boykoff, 2004 (&^%! pdf).
Jules Boykoff, Associate Professor, Politics and Government, Pacific University, Oregon; Maxwell Boykoff, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder.

 

George C. Marshall Institute, Founders: Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, Chauncey Starr, Willis Hawkins, Bill Nierenberg; George Marshall (1880 – 1959); OECD / Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

 

The Climate Majority, Jon Krosnick, June 8 2010; here's some background: Sen. Murkowski's EPA Resolution on Greenhouse Gases Slated for June 10 Vote, May 25, & NYT Editorial Where’s the Senate on This One?, June 9; and the outcome: EPA keeps power to police greenhouse gases & Senate Rejects Republican Effort to Thwart Carbon Limits, June 10, ... ambiguous, unresolved, something like that, murky let's say.

 

Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production - Priority Products and Materials - Flyer (2 pages, pdf), Outline Report (112 pages, pdf), UNEP, June 2010, one has to wonder what use or ornament is provided by these silly babbling bureaucrats and their reports?

 

here's a little 'media' exercise: two movies, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth 2006 & Martin Durkin's The Great Global Warming Swindle 2007, you can buy them via the previous links, or you can download them here & here, or you can get copies at your Public Library ... just a sec ... well not in Toronto (The Good) where the library does not carry Martin Durkin apparently, whatever ... at the very least you will get to see what Tim Ball & Ian Clark (the k-k-Canadian contingent) and some others of the denialists actually look like up close ... maybe you need to do this at the end of a depressing day with the help of a pack of cigarettes and a mickey of cheap rum to get the full effect ... whatever ... here's one little probleminha f'rinstance - if Al Gore glows it is because he was born with the proverbial 'silver spoon' - he is certainly 'buff,' a bit overweight maybe but buff, and the deniers are not grotesquely deformed, neither are they transparently stupid liars (as is Christopher Monckton for example - you just need a glance at the man to see what he is up to), nor can you immediately dismiss most of their arguments as specious or facetious or whatever, at least I can't - you have to dig a bit, look at the 'facts' & 'compare and contrast' for the arguments to fall apart, at least I do ... and I go off humming a few bars of Bob, "When that steamboat whistle blows I’m gonna give you all I got to give." (Dear Landlord, no more Bob on YouTube - silly buggers at Sony think this is protecting copyright or something - but still, this tune has the only legitimate use of a modifier applied to 'unique' in my memory :-)

 

 
a-and ok, maybe Clive Hamilton and his Requiem for a Species is just another flash in the pan? another in the (getting to be long) line of distinguished efforts amounting to 'Close but no cigar,' another arrogant bourgeois Yankee? another Naomi Klein/Sid Ryan nitwit who could be from Toronto? another potato farmer from Idaho or Iowa or wherever it is hooked on his grandchildren?

and God knows what moves any of these people day-to-day - flogging books? makin' bacon? indulging in intellectual arrogance? soakin' up Andy Warhol's 15 minutes? simple opportunism? ... I can't say ...

but what I can say is this: he seems to have gotten at the identity issues around consumption; he seems to have begun at least to categorize denial in the face of planetary exhaustion (both ecological and psychological :-); he seems not to have been distracted by band-aid solutions such as nuclear energy & geoengineering; and he seems to have the perspicacity & detailed memory not to be fooled by economists - that's a pretty good start, here's his conclusion:

Despair, Accept, Act. These are the three stages we must pass through. Despair is a natural human response to the new reality we face and to resist it is to deny the truth ... Emerging from despair means accepting the situation and resuming our equanimity; but if we go no further we risk becoming mired in passivity and fatalism. Only by acting, and acting ethically, can we redeem our humanity.

which is just about exactly where I have gotten to as well, if only 'acting ethically' weren't so cerebral :-)


Well you can't say yes, and you can't say no,
But you'll be right there when the whistle blows.

Hear the whistle blowing, hear it for a thousand miles.

Rolling Stones, All Down The Line 1972 - Exile on Main Street, 1972 Live, 1978, 2006 - Mick at 63 :-)

 

you can look at a tree year after year and not realize that while it looks about the same, the material you see is composed of entirely different molecules and atoms, renewed each spring and summer ...




forgot already ... (original start):
Leonard Cohen sometimes gives us an unmistakeable clue, "your lonliness tells you you've sinned," and for a second there last week I had a word, I had the word ... meditating on old failures and betrayals, patterns of loss, weeping over pictures of my kids in old photo albums, and the slow slide into solitary nutbar-dom, boo-hoo! but it is gone again already, lost, maybe it will come back - who knows? and there was something to do with a story I heard once about how Eskimo puppies are raised as children up to a point and then abruptly kicked out of the igloo to live with the dogs ... maybe the story came from my friend Keith who raised Malamutes ... can't remember and it's too late to ask him ... whatever,

... a-and, the bootstrap I pulled myself up on was hearing of Clive Hamilton's book Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change (and if that ain't doomer psychology at its very most worst-est then I don't know what is :-)

the book is not available ANYWHERE in Toronto (Canada's largest city, which is a surprise, how can that be?) so I ordered a copy on-line and then trolled my public library (which is one of the things in Toronto which really does work, though you might not guess it immediately from their website :-) for some older titles, and so, no, I have not read it yet and all of this is mere & idle speculation ...



Appendices:
1. The Climate Majority, Jon Krosnick, June 8 2010.



***************************************************************************
The Climate Majority, Jon Krosnick, June 8 2010.

ON Thursday, the Senate will vote on a resolution proposed by Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, that would scuttle the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by American businesses.

Passing the resolution might seem to be exactly what Americans want. After all, national surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people.

But a closer look at these polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.

In our survey, which was financed by a grant to Stanford from the National Science Foundation, 1,000 randomly selected American adults were interviewed by phone between June 1 and Monday. When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.

For many issues, any such consensus about the existence of a problem quickly falls apart when the conversation turns to carrying out specific solutions that will be costly. But not so here.

Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent — but 76 percent.

Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power.

And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).

Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.

Our poll also indicated that some of the principal arguments against remedial efforts have been failing to take hold. Only 18 percent of respondents said they thought that policies to reduce global warming would increase unemployment and only 20 percent said they thought such initiatives would hurt the nation’s economy. Furthermore, just 14 percent said the United States should not take action to combat global warming unless other major industrial countries like China and India do so as well.

Our findings might seem implausible in light of recent polls that purport to show that Americans are increasingly skeptical about the very existence of climate change. But in fact, those polls did not produce conflicting evidence at all.

Consider, for example, the most publicized question from a 2009 Pew Research Center poll: “From what you’ve read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, or not?” This question measured perceptions of scientific evidence that the respondent has read or heard about, not the respondents’ personal opinions about whether the earth has been warming. Someone who has had no exposure to scientific evidence or who perceives the evidence to be equivocal may nonetheless be convinced that the earth has been heating up by, say, the early blossoming of plants in his garden.

Or consider a widely publicized Gallup question: “Thinking about what is said in the news, in your view, is the seriousness of global warming generally exaggerated, generally correct or is it generally underestimated?” This question asked about respondents’ perceptions of the news, not the respondents’ perception of warming. A person who believes climate change has been happening might also feel that news media coverage of it has been exaggerated.

Questions in other polls that sought to tap respondents’ personal beliefs about the existence and causes of warming violated two of the cardinal rules of good survey question design: ask about only one thing at a time, and choose language that makes it easy for respondents to understand and answer each question.

Imagine being asked this, from a poll by CNN: “Which of the following statements comes closest to your view of global warming: Global warming is a proven fact and is mostly caused by emissions from cars and industrial facilities like power plants and factories; global warming is a proven fact and is mostly caused by natural changes that have nothing to do with emissions from cars and industrial facilities; or, global warming is a theory that has not yet been proven.”

Notice that the question didn’t even offer the opportunity for respondents to say they believe global warming is definitely not happening — not the sort of question that will provide the most valid measurements.

When surveys other than ours have asked simple and direct questions, they have produced results similar to ours. For example, in November, an ABC News/Washington Post survey found that 72 percent of respondents said the earth has been heating up, and a December poll by Ipsos/McClatchy found this proportion to be 70 percent.

Our surveys did reveal a small recent decline in the proportion of people who believe global warming has been happening, from 84 percent in 2007 to 80 percent in 2008 to 74 percent today. Statistical analysis of our data revealed that this decline is attributable to perceptions of recent weather changes by the minority of Americans who have been skeptical about climate scientists.

In terms of average earth temperature, 2008 was the coldest year since 2000. Scientists say that such year-to-year fluctuations are uninformative, and people who trust scientists therefore ignore this information when forming opinions about global warming’s existence. Citizens who do not trust climate scientists, however, base their conclusions on their personal observations of nature. These low-trust individuals were especially aware of the recent decline in average world temperatures; they were the ones in our survey whose doubts about global warming have increased since 2007.

This explanation is especially significant, because it suggests that the small recent decline in the proportion of people who believe in global warming is likely to be temporary. If the earth’s temperature begins to rise again, these individuals may reverse course and rejoin the large majority who still think warming is real.

Growing public skepticism has, in recent months, been attributed to news reports about e-mail messages hacked from the computer system at the University of East Anglia in Britain (characterized as showing climate scientists colluding to silence unconvinced colleagues) and by the discoveries of alleged flaws in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Our new survey discredited this claim in multiple ways. First, we found no decline in Americans’ trust in environmental scientists: 71 percent of respondents said they trust these scientists a moderate amount, a lot or completely, a figure that was 68 percent in 2008 and 70 percent in 2009. Only 9 percent said they knew about the East Anglia e-mail messages and believed they indicated that climate scientists should not be trusted, and only 13 percent of respondents said so about the I.P.C.C. reports’ alleged flaws.

Interestingly, Americans are not alone in having their views portrayed inaccurately. A February BBC News survey asked Britons, “From what you know and have heard, do you think that the earth’s climate is changing and global warming is taking place?” Seventy-five percent of respondents answered affirmatively, down a somewhat improbable eight percentage points from 83 percent in November. A BBC headline blared, “Climate Skepticism on the Rise,” when it should have proclaimed that a huge majority of Britons still share common ground with one another and with Americans on this issue.

GLOBAL warming has attracted what political scientists dub an “issue public”: millions of Americans who are passionate about this subject and put pressure on government to follow their wishes. For over a decade, this group has been of typical issue-public size, about 15 percent of American adults.

Although issue publics usually divide about equally on opposing sides — think of abortion or immigration — 88 percent of the climate change issue public in our survey believed that global warming has been happening; 88 percent attributed responsibility for it to human action; 92 percent wanted the federal government to limit the amount of greenhouse gases that businesses can emit. Put simply, the people whose votes are most powerfully shaped by this issue are sending a nearly unanimous signal to their elected representatives.

All this makes global warming a singular issue in American politics. Even as we are told that Americans are about equally divided into red and blue, a huge majority shares a common vision of climate change. This creates a unique opportunity for elected representatives to satisfy a lot of voters.

When senators vote on emissions limits on Thursday, there is one other number they might want to keep in mind: 72 percent of Americans think that most business leaders do not want the federal government to take steps to stop global warming. A vote to eliminate greenhouse gas regulation is likely to be perceived by the nation as a vote for industry, and against the will of the people.