Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet

by Clive Hamilton, George Wilkenfeld

Living Hot tells the blunt truth about our current climate change it’s time to get cracking on making Australia resilient to intensifying climate extremes. If we prepare well, we can give ourselves a fighting chance to preserve some of the best of what we have, build stronger and fairer communities, find a path through the escalating pressures of a warming world – and even find new ways to flourish.

To get there, we must leave behind both the doomism and the wishful thinking currently holding us back. In Living Hot , highly respected academic Clive Hamilton and policy consultant George Wilkenfeld shift the emphasis away from reducing carbon emissions and on to making Australia resilient, outlining a vision for an all-embracing and on-going program of investment and social change to protect ourselves from the ravages of a changing climate.

Living Hot is a sober assessment of the challenges we face, and a farsighted road map for what we must do next if we want to survive and even thrive on our heating planet.

Genres: Nonfiction, Climate Change

155 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 5, 2024

About the author

Clive Hamilton AM FRSA is an Australian public intellectual and Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics and the Vice-Chancellor's Chair in Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University. He is a member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government, and is the Founder and former Executive Director of The Australia Institute. He regularly appears in the Australian media and contributes to public policy debates. Hamilton was granted the award of Member of the Order of Australia on 8 June 2009 for "service to public debate and policy development, particularly in the fields of climate change, sustainability and societal trends".


(From Wikipedia.)

Reviews

[S · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is....not great. Really, it is a low quality book on Australia's need for climate adaptation.

The book has at its core a difficult argument. It argues the time for Australia to do climate mitigation has ended, the time for climate adaptation in Australia is now. The falseness of this dichotomy is never really explained, and why Australia can't do both is not clear.

Putting that to one side, the book seems to prioritise its effort strangely. For example, a full quarter of the book (30 of 120 pages) is devoted to 'debunking' recent calls to rapidly decarbonise Australia (characterised by the author as crash decarbonisation, which goes undefined), but the argumentation often doesn't seem to rise higher than contradiction or straw man counterargument with much of the 'refutation' targeted at each book's tone or authors. I had the benefit of only just finishing The Big Switch, so had its argument fresh in my mind - most of the presented case against it really feels like semantics. Other arguments against all three books feel like "Um, Actually" level minor corrections that really don't dispute each book's core argument. It feels like surface level engagement but, more fundamentally, the argument that "it's too hard to reduce emissions" doesn't really build towards the book's main thrust.

And the research.... well. The book's research really does feel mixed. Footnotes range from news articles to high quality academic articles to interviews, to straight assertion with footnote to continue the assertion. But far too many 'references' don't seem to support the points claimed. As the quality of media coverage and analysis declines, I'm finding myself more and more suspicious of books that solely rely on citations to news articles as sources. Doubly so for citations to news articles that seem to have been a quick google - and yet behind almost every footnote in this book is found not primary research but secondary sources.

An example of where this manifests is the brief section on China's climate adaptation. The section breezily covers the wavetops of China and emissions reduction without troubling itself to get into the detail, using a single news article as a source. The quote that symbolised this most to me was "If China's leaders believe that, through mammoth investments, the country can become a 'climate-adapted society' by 2035, shouldn't we cast aside false hopes of global cooperation and technological rescue and make single-minded efforts to do the same?".... Umm, no? If my response seems a bit flippant, take heart - I assure you, it matches the analysis presented by the authors to justify their question. The authors seem to truly believe the varied intentions of this vast country can be distilled into a single official statement, as reported in a news article, and on which they base their question above.

Finally, the argumentation feels as patchy as the research. For example, while castigating the federal government for lacking detailed plans for adaptation, it explains the federal government's role in the area is unclear and most is for local government to do. Another example - despite arguing for its importance, the section on detailed adaptation actions is brief - 10 pages! - and it provides no more than broad areas of consideration for how to actually do adaptation. These areas are well studied - there are people doing this adaptation work right now. The lack of detail in this section for a book that claims this is its focus is galling.

All in all, I'm not sure this is a helpful or interesting book for anyone wanting to know about climate adaptation and Australia.

[Vaibhavi 27 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gives a rather realistic picture of what needs to be done. I appreciate the new approach authors took in this research- highly reading it!

[Robert Manning · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like Clive Hamilton. I like the way he thinks and writes. He tells us uncomfortable truths that should open our eyes and make us change the way we live and think. Living Hotter is one such warning. It makes sense to start preparing now like China has done but we will do nothing until the flood waters soak the MCG and players are washed away into the stands. Australians are easily distracted, politicians know this and use it to hide those same truths Hamilton is trying to expose. A great and important book that will change nothing.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If the country with by far the highest emissions in the world (China) is unwilling to slash them fast enough to moderate warming and is readying itself for extreme climate change, then isn’t that the future we must prepare for? … shouldn’t we cast aside false hopes of global cooperation and technological rescue and make single-minded efforts to do the same?” - this statement alone hits like a truck.
As climate change continues I feel the chapters of “hope” that always end older books will, as this points out, just become “adaptation guides”.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors explain the need for Australia to adapt to a warmer climate because action to stop climate change will take too long to stop temperatures rising. They are critical of the very positive outlooks of Griffith, Finkel and Garnaut who underestimate the difficulties involved in stopping climate change. It's a disturbing message but probably one we need to hear. We need to slow down climate change and at the same time learn how to cope with higher temperatures.

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wasn't too bad, but more focused upon what George & Clive thought was 'bad' and how the Australian government wasn't doing the right thing, along with industry, but there wasn't much about what 'we' really could do, and what everyone could do to help this 'heating' planet. Lots of good ideas and debates, but not much in the solution which was disappointing. Suitable for older teens and adults.

[Russell Tassicker]

:[

[Nicola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well. That was grim. Important and a bit more realistic, but we're still beholden to bad leadership, so... grim.

[KJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sobering call to resilience

[Dan Schu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, very informative. The one thing was how pessimistic it was. While I don’t like how negative it was, it did seem realistic and actually quite sad.