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Today at TED Global in Oxford, among other great talks, I was blown away by this graph, shown by David McCandless.     It shows the media mentions of scares, all of them false alarms. Notice the huge peaks for swine flu and bird flu. Notice how video game fears peak twice a year, once in […]

Matt’s TEDGlobal talk in Oxford My TED talk is now live online. At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It’s not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective […]

Remember who needs to persuade who on climate change I have just one comment on the Climategate reports and that is this. People who ask the world to spend $45 trillion on a project are surely under an obligation to show their raw data and their workings. If instead, they publish only `adjusted data’ rather than […]

Ten reasons I want the Netherlands to win the World Cup Ten reasons I want the Netherlands to win the World Cup 1. More than almost any nation since the Phoenicians, the Dutch traded rather than plundered their way to prosperity in their Golden Age. 2. They were cheated out of winning (hosting?) the industrial […]

Rational Optimism reaches the tabloids I am in today’s Sun newspaper. Fully clothed. WHEN I was growing up in the 1970s we were warned the ice age was returning, the population explosion was unstoppable and we’d all be poisoned by chemicals in the environment. None of these things happened. In fact, all the trends went in […]

Green politicking can do real harm Tim Worstall has a superb rebuke to the idiotic argument that greedy speculation, rather than greenie politicking, was the real cause of the high food prices, hunger and food riots of 2008: In short, futures allow speculation upon the future: which is why we have them, for speculation upon the […]

Previous declarations of scientific consensus have often proved wrong Update: apologies for formatting problems in a previous version of this blog post. Last week a study claimed that 97-98 percent of the most published climate scientists agree with the scientific consensus that man-made climate change is happening. Well, duh. Of course they would: it’s their livelihood. […]

Where are the pressure groups for good news? have written a blog at the Huffington Post called Down with Doom. Here’s an extract: I now see at firsthand how I avoided hearing any good news when I was young. Where are the pressure groups that have an interest in telling the good news? They do not […]

A well timed lightning bolt I was giving a talk in Bozeman, Montana, last night at an event to celebrate the 30th anniversary ofPERC, a think tank that encourages private approaches to wildlife conservation and free-market environmental solutions. Just as I uttered the words “of course, things will still go wrong”, there was a huge […]

Ardipithecus is too interesting to fight over I spent an afternoon this week getting a personal tour of a cast of the skeleton of Ardipithecus from Tim White, the leader of the team that decsribed it. Call me a nerd, but I found it spine-tingling to hold in my hands the skull of a 4.4.million […]