Average city futures

(Attention conservation notice: this is a bit of a ramble).
My local (and rather good) listings mag Venue just ran a six page feature on what the future might be like for the Bristol-Bath region. Got me thinking again about how to approach such a question. I guess I didn’t think the actual feature (not online) [...]

Smoke, mirrors and carbon?

I have a bit of a problem with climate change. I am trying not to give too much weight to technology as an influence on possible futures. And especially when thinking about global change I am convinced that social technologies, as it were, will be as important as anything deriving from natural sciences or engineering [...]

Leave it to Gaia? No thanks…

A less than enthusiastic response to the Royal Society report on geoengineering in the Guardian this morning from Gaian guru Jim Lovelock. He reckons it is a bad idea, because understanding of earth systems is so poor and we do not know what undesired effects it might have – the standard blanket objection in other [...]

engineering the future

Revising older chapters of a draft throws up a few discernible shifts in ongoing discussion. One is the detail and – as far as is possible with largely absent data – rigour of examinations of geoengineering (AKA hacking the planet) as a response to climate change.
Two recent reports – from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers [...]

Greenery at the top, up to a point

Good to find Peter Mandelson highlighting climate change in a speech at the LSE yesterday. As minister for the Business and enterprise, his take is, perhaps inevitably geared to economic growth. Thus:
“The core challenge of climate change politics is getting people to connect their choices now with outcomes in the relatively distant future and in [...]

Signals from the future

The title is the phrase which leaps out from the thoughtful new report from Global Dashboard’s Alex Evans and David Steven. Their effort is directed at focussing ideas about how to respond to climate change on reshaping international institutions, which has to be right.
The phrase is supposed to mean that such institutions need to manage [...]

Politics of climate change

Tony Giddens’ new book on climate change is attracting some interesting crits. Giddens is a good specimen of that rare species in the UK, the public intellectual. He’s steered a nicely judged path between devoting his life to the promulgation of a single idea, like Richard Dawkins, and offering views on so many things you [...]

New media, old metaphors

After a weekend in which British newspapers have been fairly free with the “internet will make us all dumb by reducing attention spans” lament, slightly encouraging to find Wired news featuring a video game which is a) about climate change – in some sense of “about” and b) apparently rather good.
I keep an eye out [...]

Limits to Growth got it right…

New Scientist recently ran a suite of features on the need to re-think our assumptions about economic growth which was reminiscent of the 1970s (and that’s fine by me). They follow up this week by highlighting an interesting paper from Graham Turner of CSIRO in Autralia, now published in the Journal Global Environmental Change but [...]

jesus saves…

Been having trouble lately reconciling a long-standing dislike for overblown rhetoric with genuine concern for climate change. The problem? All these exhortations to save the planet.
I have so many ways of getting annoyed with with this it is hard to know where to begin. It is daft (the planet is pretty much impervious to anything [...]