RSA - Facing up to Climate Change

Facing up to Climate Change

12th May 2010; 18:00

(full recording including audience Q&A)
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RSA Keynote

Sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard. Any number of reports and scientific papers have warned of a dire future if we do not act, but around the world only a few have faced up to the full meaning of global warming.

Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, visits the RSA to discuss his new book Requiem for a Species - a book which asks why we have ignored the warnings, so that now it is too late?

Requiem for a Species considers the frailties of the human species: our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the earth - our capacity to reason and our connection to nature - and those that, in the end, won out - our greed, materialism and alienation from nature. And it is about the 21st century consequences of this failure.

Speaker: Clive Hamilton, Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Australian National University, Canberra.

Chair: Will Shaw, RSA

Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsahamilton