Mobilising the Public

On March 7th, I spoke at the Belvedere Forum in Warsaw, Poland. I discussed what needs to be done to mobilise the public to support action on climate change, and whether last year’s COP24 in Katowice has kept alive the flame of hope from Paris. . Climate change is a […]

We should be very concerned that the temperature is twice what it should be at this time of year – BBC News

This is twice the temperature that you would expect at this time of year, imagine if this was the summer and we had an extreme event that raised the temperature to twice what it would normally be then people would be very worried indeed, you wouldn’t be able to go […]

Record temperatures set for February – BBC News

What we have got is temperatures that are twice what they normally are at this time of year, well imagine if this was the summer and the temperature was twice what it would normally be, and you really get a idea of how serious this problem could be, and why […]

Climate justice and development – The Oxford Forum on International Development

There are three key points I want to make about climate justice and development. The first is that climate change presents humanity with a unique challenge. We have never before faced a problem like this. There is no other problem that will impact on the security and prosperity of literally […]

WHAT THE MID-TERMS MEAN FOR THE CLIMATE

The mid-term elections in the US are widely seen as having been something of a referendum on Trump. If so, despite his protestations to the contrary, he lost. There was much media commentary on election day and immediately after about the non-appearance of the forecast Democratic wave. As is becoming […]

Inheritance: Give it up or pass it on? – Radio 4

Bronwen Maddox meets the environmentalist Tom Burke, who plans to pass on the majority of his legacy to his passion: supporting bird life. Tom was brought up on a council estate in Plymouth, and didn’t inherit any money from his parents. He says hard work, luck and the property price […]

Extreme weather events and Climate Attribution – Sky News

Significant weather events are becoming more frequent, and you can see in the records that extreme weather events are happening more often than they used to happen. Now we are beginning to be able to read the climate signal, that’s the bit that we can attribute specifically to climate change, […]

Tom Burke remembering his friend Lord Peter Melchett who has died at the age of seventy – Radio 4 – Last Word – 7 September 2018.

What Peter really did was take Greenpeace into the big league. He was an extraordinary person who combined a deep analytical intelligence with a very profound moral clarity. He was a leader, he wasn’t a manager, and he lead the organisation extremely well. He had a really good political instinct […]

Climate change is reaching a tipping point – Sky News

Think of climate change as a disease like diabetes, if you don’t do anything about it, it gets progressively worse. If we don’t do anything to stop the climate from reaching these tipping points, we will find ourselves in a world in which large parts are uninhabitable.

Prosperity, Security, Stability

  These are anxious times. Much that we take for granted in the way the world is ordered is in flux. The brief moment when scholars talked confidently of the ‘End of History’ has passed. Change is no longer an option, to be welcomed or resisted, as a matter of […]