PLAYING GOD WITH THE CLIMATE

The program identifies its broadcast home as 3CR in Melbourne, Australia, and welcomes listeners to the Climate Action Radio Show, also heard on Skid Row in Sydney. It acknowledges Elders past and present and honours Aboriginal struggles for land rights and against mining projects linked to climate change. The acknowledgement names the Wangan and Jagalingu custodians in central Queensland and the Gomeroi custodians in New South Wales, along with their opposition to coal and gas. The opening frames care for country as a responsibility shared across the whole community. A poem about Caesar in a tent sets a reflective tone before the program turns to climate engineering. The discussion presents global dimming as geoengineering that could change the atmosphere and regulate the light reaching Earth from the sun. It places that idea beside the sun’s spiritual significance in cultures where it is understood as the source of growth, food, and the rhythms of day and season. The program asks whether trying to regulate such a force should be treated as out of bounds. A discussion of Clive Hamilton’s Earth Masters brings in David Suzuki’s warning that mega-technological solutions should not be expected to come without problems while knowledge of the biosphere remains limited. The program follows that warning with the point that the most manageable subject is human conduct, where the record has not exactly been brilliant. Attention then shifts to policies described as pushing society down a road toward four or five degrees of warming. The road image includes ignored exits at 1.5 and 1.6 degrees, giving the climate debate a sharp sense of direction and choice. United Nations conferences appear as the place where those exits, the promises attached to them, and the means of enforcing them need to be discussed. The program introduces Wynton Higgins, a writer and academic who has worked as a barrister and is now described as a secular Buddhist scholar. His contribution links climate action with Laudato Deum, Albert Camus, an ethical way of life, justice, and radical political transformation. The conversation then moves to a section titled The weakness of international politics in a letter signed by Pope Francis. Questions about international politics broaden into an examination of what climate action asks of civil society. The closing thanks Thea Ormerod and Wynton Higgins as guides to Laudato Deum and points listeners to the show notes for the letter and for ARC. It urges people to join the climate movement or one of the groups discussed during the program. The final appeal presents collective participation as a way to resist megalomania and conservative inaction before the sign-off returns to coal and the show’s Monday 5pm broadcast.

As heard by us

A grave climate episode links geoengineering, Laudato Deum, and the civic work of joining something.

Playing God with the Climate sets geoengineering against the sacred force of the sun, the limits of what humans know about the biosphere, and the political drift toward four or five degrees of warming.

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Want to hear climate engineering weighed through ethics, global dimming, Laudato Deum, and the stubborn work of collective action?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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