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''Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change'' is a 2010 non-fiction book by Australian academic Clive Hamilton which explores climate change denial and its implications. It argues that climate change will bring about large-scale, harmful consequences for habitability for life on Earth including humans, which it is too late to prevent. Hamilton explores why politicians, corporations and the public deny or refuse to act on this reality. He invokes a variety of explanations, including wishful thinking, ideology, consumer culture and active lobbying by the fossil fuel industry.〔 The book builds on the author's fifteen-year prior history of writing about these subjects, with previous books including ''Growth Fetish'' and ''Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change''. ''Requiem for a Species'' has been reviewed in ''Resurgence magazine'', ''Socialist Review'', ''Sydney Morning Herald'', ''The Age'', ''The Common Review'', and ''Times Higher Education'', which named it "Book of the Week". Extracts of the book have appeared in ''The Guardian'' and ''Geographical magazine''. The book won a 2010 Queensland Premier's Literary Award. ==Themes== Hamilton points out that there have been many reports and books over the years explaining the climate change problem and just how ominous the future looks for humanity. He says ''Requiem for a Species'' is primarily about why those warnings have been ignored. Hamilton considers that sometimes an inconvenient truth may be too difficult to bear:
The most immediate reason for the failure to act on global warming is seen to be the "sustained and often ruthless exercise of political power by the corporations who stand to lose from a shift to low- and zero-carbon energy systems". Hamilton cites numerous journalists and authors who have documented the influence of large companies such as ExxonMobil, Rio Tinto Group and General Motors. Hamilton makes his argument in three stages:
Hamilton suggests that the foundations of climate change denial lie in the reaction of American conservatism to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He argues that as the "red menace" receded, conservatives who had put energy into opposing communism sought other outlets. Hamilton contends that the conservative backlash against climate science was led by three prominent physicists -- Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg. In 1984 Seitz, Jastrow and Nierenberg founded the George C. Marshall Institute, and in the 1990s the Marshall Institute's main activity was attacking climate science. When describing climate science, Hamilton says that official numbers published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are highly cautious, and so the real effects of climate change will likely be even more severe.〔 His conclusion is that it will not be possible to stabilise emissions:〔
In terms of Australia, Hamilton says that "Australians in 2050 will be living in a nation transformed by a changing climate, with widespread doubt over whether we will make it to the end of the century in a land that is recognisably Australian". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Requiem for a Species」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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