Tag Archives: Irish Times

Lifting the omerta on speaking plainly

Let’s be honest for a moment. We have collectively pussy-footed around the climate and biodiversity emergency for years, decades in fact. Despite the scientific evidence piling ever higher week by week, it has long been taken as read that stating … Continue reading

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A defining moment for humanity

A number of people active in the area of climate science and activism were asked by the Irish Times in April to contribute a fairly short vignette on where we saw the current situation. My contribution, titled ‘Few options available to … Continue reading

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A safer future for all means a better future for most

This article appeared in the Irish Times in early May, based around an intriguing paper published in the journal ‘Global Environmental Change’, titled “Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario”. As the abstract begins: “It is increasingly clear … Continue reading

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Could global warming trigger deadly new ozone crisis?

It’s an extraordinary privilege to inhabit the only known oasis of abundant complex life in the galaxy. We know from paleoclimatology that life on Earth has ebbed and flowed over the ages, including surviving five epic global mass extinction events. … Continue reading

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RTÉ finally spins spotlight onto concerted climate action

Over the last decade and more, I’ve been in an uncomfortable position regarding RTÉ. On the one hand, I’ve long been a stout defender of public service broadcasting as a vital bulwark against total domination of our media landscape by … Continue reading

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A harrowing but narrow vision of our climate-wrecked futures

Back in July 2017, I wrote a précis of an astonishing essay published earlier that year in the New York magazine. Titled ‘The Uninhabitable Earth‘, it set out an uncompromising picture of the rapid unravelling of the global climate system … Continue reading

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A very British coup: rise and fall of the climate contrarians

In recent months, I’ve been involved as one of a number of authors in an international project for a forthcoming academic publication looking at the state of environmental journalism around the world (my brief covered the UK and Ireland). One of … Continue reading

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A tale told by an idiot, full of sound & fury, signifying nothing

In many respects, 2018 has been another thoroughly dispiriting year on the climate and environment beat. The publication in October of the IPCC’s SR1.5 report extinguished any remote hope that the pace and severity of climate breakdown might be less … Continue reading

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Day of reckoning on global extinction crisis draws near

Below, my article as it was published in the Irish Times last month, with some referencing added back in. To borrow one of my own lines, “A solitary species has, in a heartbeat of geological time, overturned and routed half … Continue reading

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Challenging Ireland’s climate contrarian-in-chief

Back in May 2014, UCD meteorologist, Prof Ray Bates penned a heartfelt plea for continued inaction on climate change, under the lurid headline: ‘Warning of over-alarmist’ stance on climate risk’. It was a weak, poorly argued exercise in that most … Continue reading

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Sensationalist ice-age story may betray covert media agenda

[This is a slightly extended and fully referenced (hyperlinked) version of an article which first appeared in Village Magazine on 14th August 2013.] GHOST: But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house, I could a tale … Continue reading

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Media throws in the towel on coverage of climate change

Below, my article, as it appeared in last Thursday’s Irish Times (and fair play to the IT for running a piece that is openly critical of its own editorial policy in this area; that’s the true mark of a serious … Continue reading

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More power to us if we choose nuclear option

Time to shake the ‘drill baby, drill’ debate on Ireland’s energy future up a little? here’s my piece in today’s Irish Times OPINION: Instead of seeking partners to exploit hoped-for offshore fossil fuel resources, Ireland should consider building some medium-sized … Continue reading

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Media focus on climate disappears even faster than glaciers

Global media coverage of climate change in 2010 fell to levels not seen since 2005, after spiking in late 2009 in the lead-in to the disastrous UN climate talks in Copenhagen and the theft and selective release of fragments of … Continue reading

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Getting the green message out is no Picnic

I gave the eco credentials of the Electric Picnic an enthusiastic write up in Thursday’s Irish Times column, describing it as “probably one of the most impressive environmental showcases ever assembled in Ireland”. The theme was taken up later that … Continue reading

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