Other Authors

Michael Smithson

Michael Smithson is a Professor in the Psychology Department at The Australian National University in Canberra. He has written 6 books, co-edited 3, and published more than 120 refereed articles and book chapters. His research interests focus on how people think about and respond to unknowns. He also blogs at Best Thinking.

Fiona Armstrong

Fiona Armstrong is a Melbourne-based journalist, public policy analyst and political commentator. She works with a number of different organisations and institutions. Her main interests are in health and climate policy. She is a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development, Convenor of the Climate and Health Alliance, and a founding director of CLIMARTE: Arts for a Safe Climate.

The Climate and Health Alliance is a coalition of organisations and individuals from a broad cross section of the sector, including health care professionals, health care service providers, institutions, academics, researchers, and health care consumers. The Alliance aims to contribute to the development and implementation of evidence based public policy to protect the community from the adverse consequences of climate change.

Anne Young

Anne is a primary school teacher and children’s author. She is teaching children about sustainability from an early age. Her class runs the school’s recycling program which reaches into the surrounding community. The class is also running a worm farm and is responsible for composting for the entire school. She believes that sustainability involves everything from baby steps at an early age to global politics.

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is Anglican Chaplain to UWA and works in private practice as a coach supporting leaders and organisations in developing sustainability. Prior to his work in the church Michael worked in Human Resource Management and the Australian Merchant Navy. Michael is married and has teenage children which has intensified his concern for the future of our planet. He has learned that it is very hard to grow vegetables in Perth sand, but he persists. He has degrees in Business and Theology.

Helen Camakaris

Helen Camakaris obtained her Ph. D. in 1975 in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Melbourne, where she then continued working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She became an Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow in 2008, and since then she has been writing popular science addressing the role of evolution and psychology in climate change and sustainability.

Tess Williams

Tess Williams is a speculative fiction author. Her two novels, Map of Power and Sea as Mirror, were short-listed in Australia for the Aurealis Award and Sea as Mirror was shortlisted in America for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. A co-edited volume entitled Women of Other Worlds won the William Atheling Jr. Award for contributions to Australian science fiction and she has contributed short fiction to award winning anthologies.

For over twenty years, she has taught at universities in Perth and completed her doctorate in evolutionary theory and feminist science fiction at UWA. During her doctorate studies she was awarded an ArtsWA Creative Development Fellowship and spent a year working at SymbioticA, the science/art collective at UWA. Currently, she is writing her third novel and has been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at UWA. She is also a committee member of the Australian Animal Studies Group and is investigating recent stories about whales and dolphins and human culture as part of her academic work.

Her research interests overlap with her creative writing projects and include science narratives and the construction of scientific authority, art and science, relationships with non-human others and feminist science studies and cyborg theory.

Bret Hart

Dr Bret Hart is a Public Health Physician who led the development of Community Link & Network Inc., the Aussie Optimism Program, the Alliance for Future Health Inc launched by Prof Sir Michael Marmot in 2000 and trialed the use of the Canadian Early Development Index in North Metro Perth that has since become the Australian EDI being utilized nationally.  

Philip Lawn

Philip Lawn is a senior lecturer in ecological economics at Flinders University. Philip has authored and edited six books and has written and co-written over fifty journal articles. Philip is near completion of a book entitled The Ecological Economics of Climate Change (Springer). In this book, Philip will be arguing that the climate change dilemma is a problem within a much larger problem and will only be successfully resolved if addressed within the context of the broader goal of sustainable development.

Shenggen Fan

Dr Shenggen Fan, a citizen of China, is the Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute, an eminent Washington-based think tank on food policy directed at sustainable solutions to reduce hunger and poverty. Before joining IFPRI, Shenggen served as Director of the International Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science, and is an Executive Committee member of the International Association of Agricultural Economists. He received a PhD in applied economics from the University of Minnesota and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Nanjing Agricultural University in China.

Peter Boghossian

Peter’s main focus is bringing the tools of professional philosophers to people in a wide variety of contexts. Peter has a teaching pedigree spanning more than 20 years and 30 thousand students. His fundamental objective is to teach people how to think through what often seem to be intractable problems. 

For those who would like biographical information about Dr. Boghossian, here’s his faculty web page at Portland State University, and for those wanting more details about his claims about the reliability of faith as a process, here is a recent podcast.

John Connor

John Connor is the CEO of the Climate Institute, a non-partisan, independent research organisation that works with community, business and government to catalyse and drive the change and innovation needed for a low pollution economy and culture.

John is a lawyer with a diverse background including as a researcher for Dr Peter Macdonald the Independent member for Manly who held the balance of power with the minority NSW Coalition government of the time, as a leader in environment organisations like the Australian Conservation Foundation, and as a co-convenor of the Make Poverty History campaign while working at World Vision.

John has worked on numerous government advisory panels, most recently for the Prime Minister’s Task Group on Energy Efficiency, and is a member of Westpac’s Customer Consultative Council, the Board of the Environment Defenders Office, the Commonwealth Government’s NGO Roundtable on Climate Change, the NSW Government’s Climate Council, and is a “Governator” with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition.  John joined the Institute in March 2007.

Adam Corner

Dr Adam Corner is a researcher and writer who specialises in the psychology of communicating climate change. He is the Research Director for the Climate Outreach & Information Network (COIN), and holds an Honorary Research Fellow position in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. He has written widely in academic publications and the national media (e.g., The Guardian) about the challenges of overcoming politically motivated scepticism and engaging the public on climate change, including the limitations of Freedom of Information legislation for ‘democratising’ science. He is especially interested in the tension between normative goals (such as promoting sustainable behaviour) and the long-standing norms of neutrality and disinterestedness which govern scientific research, and the challenge that communicating climate change poses in this regard.

George Crisp

George Crisp is a GP in a small family medical practice in Shenton Park. 

He is the current WA chair and a national committee member of Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA), a voluntary group who have an interest in the relationship between human health and environmental damage. 

Along with a GP colleague ( Dr Richard Yin ), he co-developed “Greenpractice” in 2009, an initiative to promote the awareness of climate change as a health issue in general practice and advocate the health co-benefits of taking action.

George writes regularly in the local and medical media on environmental health matters. 

Clive Hamilton

Clive Hamilton is an Australian author and public intellectual. In June 2008 he was appointed Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of the Australian National University, Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne.

For 14 years, until February 2008, he was the Executive Director of The Australia Institute, a progressive think tank he founded. Clive has held visiting academic positions at Yale University, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford (where is is currently).

He has published on a wide range of subjects but is best known for his books, a number of which have been best-sellers. They include Growth Fetish (2003), Affluenza (with Richard Denniss, 2005), What’s Left: The death of social democracy (2006), and The Freedom Paradox: Towards a post-secular ethics (Allen & Unwin, 2008).

Clive’s latest book, titled Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the thruth about climate change, was published by Earthscan and Allen & Unwin in 2010.

Jaqueline Haupt

Jaqueline Haupt is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Social Change at the University of Western Australia. She is a civil engineer and has a Master’s degree in environmental engineering. Jaqueline has worked assessing environmental sanitation projects in Brazilian slums for the World Bank, coordinating plans for river water quality recovery with community committees and prospecting alternative water sources for the São Paulo Megalopolis, an urban area with 30 million people in Brazil.

Mark Hurlstone

Assistant Professor Mark Hurlstone is a cognitive scientist in the School of Psychology at the University of Western Australia. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from the University of Leicester (UK), and Master’s and Doctoral Degrees from the University of York (UK). His research interests include working memory; auditory distraction and cognitive performance; reasoning and decision making; and computational modelling of cognitive processes. His research also examines how insights from psychology and behavioural economics can be harnessed to improve science communication, especially in relation to climate change. Further information about his research can be found on his academic and laboratory homepages.

Dave Kerin

Dave Kerin, Project Officer, Eureka’s Future

Dave Kerin became active in the anti-Vietnam War and Moratorium movement in the late 1960’s before starting work in the building industry at the end of 1970, when he joined the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). In his current position as Project Worker for Eureka’s Future he is working to establish the first union-supported social enterprise, manufacturing green technologies, in Morwell.


Nathalie Latter

Natalie Latter is a postgraduate student at UWA. Her PhD research focuses on the intergenerational justice aspects of climate change.

Jessica Lee

Jessica is a Law Honours candidate at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Jessica is completing her Law honours thesis on the topic of coexistence in Australian agriculture at the Australian National University. She is also the senior researcher and strategic communications officer at CropLife Australia, the peak industry organisation of the plant sciences sector. Jessica is responsible for development and delivery of research, policy and analytical content, tools and activities in the focus areas of crop protection, biotechnology and stewardship.

Jessica has also held positions as a legal researcher in human rights in Delhi, India and a research analyst in government relations. She has also led a number of ANU Law Reform and Social Justice Projects.

Tania Lombrozo

Tania Lombrozo is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is currently an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an affiliate of the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Lombrozo directs the Concepts and Cognition Lab, where she and her students study aspects of human cognition at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, including the drive to explain and its relationship to understanding, various aspects of causal and moral reasoning and all kinds of learning.

Lombrozo is the recipient of numerous awards, including an NSF CAREER award, a McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition and a Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformational Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science.

She received bachelors degrees in Philosophy and Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, followed by a PhD in Psychology from Harvard University.

 

Peter McMahon

Peter McMahon is a lecturer in Sustainable Development in the School of Sustainability, Murdoch University. Dr McMahon has published on various topics, including global political economy, technological change and sustainable development. His book Global Control: Information Technology and Globalisation since 1845 was published in the UK in 2002, and more recently the monograph titled Special Report: Development and Sustainability in WA 1829-2020 appeared at the end of 2009. He has been writing lately on the matter of sustainable development of WA in online and local media.

His core interests are analysing modern socio-economic and technological systems with a view to improving sustainability. Although now an academic and writer, he has been an activist in relation to environmental, social justice and peace issues in the past and he maintains an activist attitude.

Ben McNeil

Ben McNeil is a senior research fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Ben has a Master of Economics in Political Economy and a PhD in climate science. Ben advises government and business on strategic thinking around sustainability. He is an expert reviewer for the United Nations IPCC and was invited to present his research to the Prime Minister and Cabinet. He speaks regularly at corporate and scientific events and to media. Ben lives in Sydney.

Ben Newell

Ben Newell is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of New South Wales. His research focuses on judgment and decision making.

Klaus Oberauer

Klaus Oberauer studied Psychology at the Free University Berlin and earned his doctoral degree (Dr. phil) at University of Heidelberg in 1995. He has held research positions at the University of Mannheim (1994-1997) and the University of Potsdam (1997-2005), and was appointed as Professor of Psychology at University of Bristol in 2005. He is currently Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Zurich (since 2009). His research interests include working memory, reasoning, and capacity limits of cognition. He investigates these topics through behavioral experiments, studies of individual and age differences, and computational modelling.

Asa Wahlquist

Åsa Wahlquist has been a rural journalist since 1984. She has a long term interest in farming sustainably in the Australian environment. She has won a dozen journalism including a Walkley Award in 1996 and the Australian Government Peter Hunt Eureka Prize for Environmental Journalism in 2005.

Baerbel Winkler

Bärbel Winkler lives and works in Germany. She has always had a lot of interest in environmental issues and has been active as a volunteer at her local zoo and a conservation group for many years. As a means to turn her concern regarding climate change into something productive, Bärbel joined the Skeptical Science team in 2010 and started translating selected content into German. Since 2013 she has been coordinating the translation efforts for all languages and also contributes a blog-post every once in a while. She is a co-author of Cook et al “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature” which was published in May 2013.

John Wiseman

John Wiseman is a Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the impacts of climate change on health and wellbeing; Engaging communities in informed discussion about climate change responses; Relationships between climate change community attitudes and public policy; Using scenarios to inform climate change decision making; Designing, visualising and implementing transitions to a sustainable, low carbon economy, Local and regional climate change adaptation strategies.