About

There’s a gap between our understanding of the reality of global environmental crises and what most people will say about them. This independent website will take an informal look at ideas and perspectives on sustainability, starting with basic physical aspects of climate change and mitigation.

Climate change is a critical global challenge that’s profoundly difficult to navigate. Global cooperation has consistently fallen short of effectively addressing the scale of the crisis, genuine mitigation is frequently viewed as economically and politically inconvenient, and the underlying physical realities remain widely misunderstood.

Can we fix the climate? Physically, yes. We have the means to begin to genuinely correct the core physical driver, the global carbon imbalance, bringing down the global mean temperature this century while the oceans and the rest of the climate system slowly rebalance over centuries and millennia. Politically, the answer is much harder. Highly ambitious climate targets, such as limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100, would call for a pace and scope of global cooperation and structural transformation that would require us to evolve fundamentally beyond the way the world is currently run.

The Climate Change posts invite you to explore basic, big-picture aspects of the problem for yourself. They generally don’t weigh in on the political, cultural, economic, or ethical dimensions. They’re like easy-to-reference cheatsheets with basic facts and insights, mostly from IPCC reports. There are clear explanations in the source articles, and links to these are provided at the end of each post.

Ecological decline is also a critical global challenge. It would defeat the purpose if our future decarbonisation technologies caused irreversible damage to the rest of the biosphere.

The Links page will be curated more actively later, and will take in a wider range of perspectives.

The site will slowly sketch out a unique picture of the sustainability landscape, celebrating hopeful and humane approaches that respect the integrity of nature’s systems, while recognising the need for nuanced approaches to messy and contested topics to stay open to possibilities.

My background is in engineering and technology. I spent several years working professionally in sustainability-related roles, and I’ve spent many years exploring sustainability issues.

If you’re curious about the origins of the site, click here: Background.

Cheers,
Sean

I acknowledge the traditional owners of country (throughout Australia), and pay my respects to their elders, past and present.