Just before Easter, attorney-general George Brandis appeared in the UK libertarian free speech magazine Spiked to attack the Greens and Labor over a variety of issues. He singled out climate change as…
- Director, Climate Change Communication Research Hub, Monash University
The incredibly well-funded climate denier industry in the US will be dealt a severe blow this weekend with the release of a well-produced 16-episode series on climate change by the Hollywood elite: Years…
The Abbott government’s long-standing insistence that its mandate to govern can all be traced back to a protest against the carbon tax were renewed this weekend, when even the WA Senate re-election result…
Given the efforts around the world to discredit climate change science as a “socialist plot”, it is worth looking not at the relationship of socialist states to climate change, but to foundational socialist…
On the ABC’s Insiders on Sunday, discussion turned to media reform, and the panellists were in remarkable consensus. The consensus seemed to be that reform was long overdue: a sense that it is time for…
Two political speeches that grabbed the most attention last week were those of Greens senator Scott Ludlam and prime minister Tony Abbott. Both were quite peculiar but for diametrically opposing reasons…
Being able to visualise the impacts, the process and causes of climate change is not easy. Taking on board the abstract scale of the changes is challenging. Sometimes we need to refer to images from our…
More than 10 years ago, in an issue of Granta, environmentalist Bill McKibben lamented the fact climate change has not been able to capture the literary imagination in the same way as the nuclear and political…
The demise of manufacturing in this country has captured the news headlines for weeks now. It is about jobs, about sentimentality toward companies that have long been part of Australian life, and about…
After almost six months in office, it seems that the Abbott government’s reputation for action on climate change and the environment in general is in tatters. Overseas, condemnation has been directed at…
By David Holmes and Anna Matwijiw More than 50% of young Australians have seriously considered shutting down their Facebook accounts, even while many of them check the site compulsively through the day…
The democratising potential of social media have long been heralded. Successive government ministers, starting with Helen Coonan, Stephen Conroy and now Malcolm Turnbull, have all talked up the marvels…
The day after Philippines president Benigno Aquino appealed to the world to take action on global warming following the up to 379 km winds that devastated his country, the Abbott government was introducing…
The announcement last week that no Australian government ministers would be attending the UN summit on climate change in Poland tomorrow is as embarrassing as it is serious. In a previous post I had suggested…
This decade has been called the “critical decade” for action on climate change. Decisions that we make in the years up to 2020 will determine the severity of climate change, and the impact it will have…
In the past year, we have heard from several right-of-centre members of the media-political elite in Australia - some of whom dined together at Kirribilli House on the weekend - that climate change is…
In 2009, just after Black Saturday, when some of Canada’s most experienced firefighters were out in Australia to fight bushfires, they were amazed. They told journalists that while the spruce and fir forests…
For the Abbott government, it has emerged that talking about climate change during a “natural” disaster is taboo. Of course, how “natural” the NSW fires actually are is the issue here, as we witness over…
With online debate flaring around the release of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, it’s time to go deep inside the climate wars - behind the trenches - to examine the psychological warfare and the techniques…
In her A.N. Smith Lecture in Journalism delivered last night at the University of Melbourne, Katharine Viner, editor of Guardian Australia, examined the rise of the reader and the shifting power relations…
Can a newspaper group achieve consensus on the science of climate change? Last Thursday, in an article on the pseudo debate that is currently impeding the communication of climate change in Australia…
On the same day that the summary of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report was released, climate change campaigner Al Gore was giving a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington that denounced US media…
Well, it’s here, the long awaited IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. It is led by the Summary for Policy Makers as the document that is most quoted by news outlets and has more influence over public understanding…
Many will be relieved at today’s announcement by board members of the Climate Commission that they will be continuing their work by setting up a community-funded Climate Council. Communicating climate…
When an error was found in the IPCC Assessment Report Number 4 - that mountain glaciers were likely to melt by 2035 - climate change deniers obsessed about this for several years, endlessly returning to…
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