Articles tagged with "growth"

Climate change is real, substantively human-caused and represents a serious problem that humanity needs to put real effort into solving. I believe this, not because I have “done my own research”, nor because it fits my ideology, but because the consensus of experts (in this case, climatologists) have concluded that it is true, and a good sceptic must follow the evidence where it leads.

Jason Edward Hickel (born 1982) is a Swazi economic anthropologist, academic and democratic eco-socialist. He is a professor at the Institute of Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a visiting senior fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and was the Chair of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences.

I am writing in the hope that my current confusion might be cleared up by the membership of the NZ Skeptics. This concerns climate change, and more specifically the need to reduce carbon emissions – the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This is an opinion piece. That is, it is my opinion. Some of you may feel that I am wrong. If so, you are welcome to disagree. Please feel free to express your own views in the next issue of this magazine.

Two women in a yacht were rescued this week, adrift a long way off the coast of Japan. Their story is that they left Honolulu for Tahiti, and immediately hit a storm which damaged their boat. After drifting for 6 months at sea, and being attacked by sharks, they were eventually rescued by the US Navy.

The dire predictions of the Club of Rome's 1972 report on_ The Limits to Growth _have supposedly been refuted by subsequent studies, but the refutations have serious shortcomings. This article is based on a presentation to the NZ Skeptics 2009 conference in Wellington, 26 September.

The following may interest those who hesitate at the idea of "mushroom rings" being evidence of UFO landings—or of fairy shindigs.