Schools brief

Softening the blow

Climate adaptation policies are needed more than ever

People are already suffering from catastrophic losses as a result of extreme weather events like cyclone Amphan

Not-so-slow burn

The world’s energy system must be transformed completely

It has been changed before, but never as fast or fully as must happen now

Bad times

Damage from climate change will be widespread and sometimes surprising

It will go far beyond drought, melting ice sheets and crop failures

Where nature ends

Humanity’s immense impact on Earth’s climate and carbon cycle

Much needs to be done for the damage to be reversed

Projections of the future

How modelling articulates the science of climate change

From paper and pencil to the world’s fastest computers

The problematic politics of climate change

Why tackling global warming is a challenge without precedent

The first of six weekly briefs looks at the history of efforts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions

Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche

The prophets of illiberal progress

Terrible things have been done in their name

Rawls rules

Three post-war liberals strove to establish the meaning of freedom

Berlin, Rawls and Nozick put their faith in the sanctity of the individual

The exiles fight back

Hayek, Popper and Schumpeter formulated a response to tyranny

Their lives and reputations diverged, but their ideas were rooted in the traumas of their shared birthplace

Freedom v economics

Was John Maynard Keynes a liberal?

People should be free to choose. It was their freedom not to choose that troubled him

Liberal thinkers

De Tocqueville and the French exception

The gloomiest of the great liberals worried that democracy might not be compatible with liberty

The father of liberalism

Against the tyranny of the majority

John Stuart Mill's warning still resonates today