On a freezing evening towards the end of January, I sat in a car skidding across icy roads towards the centre of Waldhausen, a small village deep in the Austrian countryside. I was on my way to a lecture by one of the country’s most renowned climate scientists. In the village pub.
My husband’s family has lived in this village for generations. Waldhausen is not what you would call a metropolis. Nestled amidst rolling hills, many people here are part-time farmers or work in forestry. The conservative party has held a comfortable majority for the past few decades. …
In 2019, fires ravaged Australia, California and the Amazon, floods swept across the US, hurricanes and cyclones hit the Bahamas and Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi. Basically, disasters amplified by climate change struck at a frequency that left most regular people thinking: “Well, shit.”
Climate change has become the issue of our time — and the media has picked up on it. It seems that not a day goes by without footage flickering across our screens of koalas killed by bushfires, cities wrecked by floods or people fleeing storms. But what we don’t usually see is the damage that is left behind once the spectacle is over. And the potential for a cascade of new disasters that it entails.
Scene break: The Austrian Alps. …
Shakespeare has been revered as one of the greatest writers of the English language for nigh on three and a half centuries.
But he can also seem utterly boring, stuffy and unintelligible.
Various people have told me, that Shakespeare is an author that they would like to have read. Without actually going through the trouble of reading his plays.
For many, their first and only encounter with his work is a distant memory from high school or college English classes, haunting like the ghost of Hamlet’s dad, and tainted with the bitter taste of late-night midterm study sessions and homework assignments. …
A scientific defense of the power of individual choice in fighting climate change.
The planet needs saving, that much is clear.
We have all heard about the highest-ever greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, of skyrocketing temperatures and rising sea levels. The warning cries from scientists have been echoing through society for decades, ever-increasing in volume and occasionally underscored by striking visuals. Currently, such a striking visual are the massive losses to Greenland’s ice sheet this summer - videos have been showing torrential streams of meltwater crashing into the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. Eleven billion tons of ice were lost in a single day in early August.
Basically, doom seems to be not so much waiting around the corner as walking straight towards us with a cheerful wave. …
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