Julian Cribb
Julian Cribb AM is an Australian science writer and author of six books on the human existential emergency. His latest book is “How to Fix a Broken Planet” (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Julian's recent articles
11 April 2025
A statement by the minister for the environment in the new Australian Government
My fellow Australians: you cannot exist, and your grandkids will not exist without a safe, healthy, habitable Earth for us all to dwell upon.
31 March 2025
Delete the Earth
Day by day, species by species, landscape by landscape, the world in which humanity arose is being deleted. Eventually, what remains will be unfit for the survival of either humans or large animals.
11 March 2025
Noicide: advent of a new Dark Age
Something far more sinister than mere genocide is unfolding in the United States and other advanced nations around the world: the forces of darkness have declared open war on human knowledge.
12 February 2025
Here comes the human tsunami...
This year, more than 400 million people are in search of new homes, of food, water and family security.
30 January 2025
Lies, damned lies and catastrophic risks
For the second year running, lies have emerged as the primary risk facing humanity, in the Global Risks Survey 2024-25 conducted by the World Economic Forum of 900 experts worldwide.
28 January 2025
The end of freedom
Freedom, the dream that has inspired countless individuals, cultures, beliefs and civilisations over millennia, will soon be gone. Forever.
30 December 2024
2024 – a dire year for Human Survival
In 2024, humanity - as a whole - took a purposeful stride towards engineering the collapse of modern civilisation.
27 November 2024
A triumph for greed over commonsense and humanity
For the third year in a row the nations of the world, meeting in solemn climate conclave, have vowed to cook their children and grandchildren alive.
22 November 2024
The gods look on aghast, as human calamity unfolds...
From atop Mount Olympus, Zeus peers in perplexity through fumes of fire, dust and vehicle exhaust, toxic chemicals, roiling tempests and raging floods, idly wondering what those darned mortals are up to now...
29 October 2024
When the oceans run amok: “We ought not to ignore such clear indicators of an imminent collapse”
By disrupting the Earth’s main heat transport system, humans risk creating a new Ice Age in Europe – while the rest of the planet overheats to intolerable levels.
15 October 2024
The deafening silence in the eye of the hurricane
In the eye of the hurricane is a moment of calm and silence, before wild chaos and destruction resume. Symbolically, the world now stands in such a place.
6 October 2024
Is Arctic methane stoking the climate crisis?
The vast wildfires now ravaging the world’s northernmost regions herald rising danger for all humanity, no matter where we live.
3 October 2024
The Earth is sick – and getting sicker
Planet Earth is sick - and getting sicker, according to a new Planetary Health Check.
23 August 2024
The elephant in the room
Ted Trainer, in his critique of the report of the Roundtable on the Human Future's report, manages to overlook the mainspring of the human emergency: overpopulation. Global material consumption is currently about 110 billion tonnes/year, on track to reach 170 billion tonnes by 2050. This is 5 to 10 times what the Earth can sustain, long-term, as numerous scholars have pointed out. Even if everybody on Earth could be persuaded to halve their material consumption — a doubtful contention — civilisation would still be headed for collapse. While human numbers remain impossibly high, so too will over-production, over-consumption and...
13 June 2024
When convicts rule... civil wars may follow
If convicted felon Donald Trump wins the US presidential election in November 2024 it will probably herald the end of America as the world and as Americans know it. And maybe ignite the Second American Civil War.
28 May 2024
Did a US funded biotechnology experiment ignite the worst pandemic of modern times?
In a momentous development, the US Government has suspended funding from the biotech company increasingly linked to the origins of the Covid pandemic that slew seven million people.
19 April 2024
Coral catastrophe signals our own undoing
Five times in the history of life on Earth the corals have perished, swept from the board by conditions hostile to nearly all life. Each time, it has taken them millions of years to evolve anew. Each mass death of corals has been accompanied by the mass deaths of most other species, on land and at sea.
21 March 2024
The next World War has started
World War Three has already begun, though few have noticed. It is being fought out in parliaments and the press, on social media platforms, in pubs and at family dining tables around the globe. It is an almost silent war that will kill millions, potentially billions and wreck the planet for all.
12 February 2024
Climate chaos: world overheats while Europe faces a new Ice Age
The hottest January ever recorded in human history has passed, with barely a nod from governments worldwide and international media. For a full year, the Earth has now exceeded the +1.5 degrees danger level set by the Paris Agreement in 2015. And 2024 may be hotter still, US scientists are warning.
10 January 2024
We are exhuming the teeming Dead
In one of our most macabre and diabolical acts, humans are unburying and reactivating the Earths teeming dead from ages long gone by, in a wild act that is sure to haunt every one of us for the remainder of our days.
4 December 2023
Humanity declares war on its children
After WWII, a good many people wondered why nobody had put a stop to either Hitler or Stalin, the two greatest butchers of history prior to the modern era, before they could accomplish their wicked designs.
26 October 2023
Hallucinatory world: Governments blind as multiple catastrophes besiege human civilisation
Life on Earth is under siege. A chain of tipping points with catastrophic consequences for everyone are being unleashed. Yet governments worldwide remain indifferent to the danger. Indeed, many continue avidly to stoke the very furnaces that will consume our civilisation.
30 August 2023
An Australian Holocaust: greenhouse gas emissions and mass deaths
Australian governments and mining firms are cold-bloodedly contemplating the needless deaths of 5.3 million human beings many of them our own citizens - from climate causes resulting from new Australian fossil fuels developments.
21 July 2023
We need an Earth System Treaty to save civilisation. And we need it now
The world stands in urgent need of a universal accord to ensure it remains a Planet that our children and grandchildren can inhabit and enjoy, far into the future.
10 July 2023
Cities in mortal danger foreshadow the human fate
Often seen as marvels of the human ascendancy, the worlds great cities are in mortal danger as the resources that keep them alive stagger, dwindle and give out.
23 June 2023
Our planet is imploding: when will we act to save ourselves?
While much of humanity was glued to the unfolding drama over one tiny submarine, the Earth we all inhabit is slowly, steadily and implacably imploding around us.
11 June 2023
Look out! Here come The Elders...
There is rising wrath, out there in Elderland. The Elders, it seems, are no longer happy to look on as a bunch of corporates and their political stooges pillage the planet and lay waste their grandchildrens future. With growing resolve, resources and organisation, older people are fighting back.
4 June 2023
The earth has Bipolar Disorder: and so do we
World Environment Day June 5 demands some sober reflection about the mess we humans have got ourselves into. And how the hell we get out.
31 May 2023
Bruce Haigh: time for some revolutionary Australian art
Dont it always seem to go, that you dont know what you got till its gone? Joni Mitchell
28 April 2023
The nation state is on the skids
The 21st Century is changing much about the world that humans take for granted. Among the more shocking possibilities is that it will sound the death-knell of the nation-state as the main instrument of human self-governance.
8 April 2023
Bruce Haigh: a farewell
Bruce Haigh, who died on April 7, was a diplomat, an adventurer, an artist and writer, a humanist, a romantic and a man with a deep love of his country, who mourned its fading ideals and values.
21 February 2023
A plan for human survival
Among the worlds many pressing needs, the most urgent of all is a plan for human survival. And Australia should be the country to lead its creation.
1 January 2023
Best of 2022: The world votes for climate hell
Something of epochal importance happened in Egypt last week the most significant event since Cheops shoved up his triangular monument, four thousand odd-years ago at the dawn of civilisation. But the world media, true to form, missed it almost completely.
20 November 2022
The world votes for climate hell
Something of epochal importance happened in Egypt last week the most significant event since Cheops shoved up his triangular monument, four thousand odd-years ago at the dawn of civilisation. But the world media, true to form, missed it almost completely.
5 November 2022
8 billionth human: Has the population bomb exploded?
Sometime in the next few weeks, human being number 8,000,000,000 will enter the world. But what sort of a world will they inherit?
2 October 2022
Here comes the catastrophocene...
The good news is that the Anthropocene is almost over. It will have been the shortest geological epoch in all of Earth history.
21 July 2022
The Age of Women
Leadership by wise women is indispensable if we are to escape the catastrophe that male leadership is presently building for humanity.
2 March 2022
Humanity: sinking into a stagnant ocean
We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea. STColeridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
22 February 2022
The media's role in the age of deceit
The complicity of the media in disseminating false information is a central part of the modern phenomenon. The lie factories cannot flourish without obedient messengers to carry their deceptions.
1 December 2021
Our two-party system is corrupt vote for decency instead
Next year, voters will be able to toss out party politicians and embrace candidates with a record of integrity and commitment to the future.
18 November 2021
The earth is now warming itself it may be too late for humanity
Only the complete cessation of all human carbon emissions within this decade and removing carbon from the atmosphere will save us from immolation.
18 October 2021
Idiocracy: how the decline in human intelligence is undermining democracy
Science increasingly suspects the proliferation of harmful nerve toxins in recent decades is to blame for a downturn in our IQ levels and this is threatening not just our health but our very system of governance.
28 August 2021
Time to end the mass killing
Many times larger than climate change and more deadly than Covid or war, humanity's chemical emissions are the crisis nobody wants to acknowledge.
4 July 2021
A choice between national happiness and national misery
Australia treats its environment with indifference. Yet the evidence is mounting that the environment is at the heart of national wellbeing. One country is showing the way.
14 June 2021
Solving the mega-risks
The world is awash with literature describing the deepening self-inflicted crisis into which humanity is pitching. I am frequently asked how we can solve it, presuming we wish to do so. Here, briefly, are the ten most urgent solutions.
2 January 2021
Our national anthem is a joke. Tinkering won't fix it.
For those whove come across the seas, Weve boundless plains to share. The blackest satire in the entire rigmarole. Endorsed by both sides of politics, the plains of Manus Island, Christmas Island and Nauru are scarcely boundless. As for sharing, forget it mate. If youre a new chum, especially an African or a woman in a headscarf, youre on your Pat Malone.
2 December 2020
Why 2050 is too darned late
One and a half million people are already dead, mostly because their governments did not act on sound medical advice about Covid in a sufficient amount of time.
26 April 2020
JULIAN CRIBB. Diagnosing the American Disease
Coronavirus has become the American disease as it exploits a particular flaw in the American character and self-image. The question is, can America heal itself?