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Yes, cold weather is just weather. But that’s the point.     I have an op-ed in today’s Times on the subject of whether the man-made climate signal is going to be visible against the weather noise. Here is the gist of it, with some links. I have just cleared fresh snow in my back […]

Has the climate change obsession harmed conservation? For some time now I have been aware of environmentalists who dislike the way their agendas have been hijacked by climate change. The orthodox view is that climate change is raising the profile of all environmental issues, but is it? Can it really be easier to raise money […]

A debate in the Wall Street Journal     Update: here are some readers’ letters about our exchange. I’ve never arm-wrestled Bill Gates, but we have now had a good natured debate in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Here’s his effort, and here’s mine. A quote from his: Although I strongly disagree with what Mr. Ridley […]

Britain is burying its head in the sand about a new technology that is good for the environment Update: I have misled the reader about the quantity of neodymium in a wind turbine magnet. The magnet is not pure neodymium, but an alloy of Nd, iron and Boron. So there’s a lot less than 2.5 […]

Here is a spectacular speech by my good friend June Arunga, on optimism about Africa. “The broad generalisations that label Africa a continent of failure and business losses are plain wrong. They are part of that same pessimism that insists the only products worth investing in are misery and minerals.”

A response from scientists on ocean acidifciation We are getting somewhere. There is a long response to my Times article from ocean acidification scientists  here. This makes me rather happy. The response confirms the accuracy of my main points. I have sent the following response to Nature’s website, which carried a report on this matter: I […]

Neither Neanderthals nor a volatile climate caused innovation 42,000 years ago On his blog, A Very Remote Period Indeed, Julien Riel-Salvatore discusses his recent paper about Neanderthals and innovation: I’m quoted [in the press release] as saying, among other things, that this study helps ‘rehabilitate’ Neanderthals by showing that they were able to develop some of […]

Mankind enhances natural productivity as well as eats it I have just found at Spiked Online Brendan O’Neill’s superb recent essay on whether the earth is finite, and I heartily recommend it. Here’s a sample: Over the past 200 years, Malthusians have tended to look at people as simply the users-up of scarce resources. They have […]

This is not the best of all possible worlds Here is my latest Wall Street Journal column. It led me into the etymology of the word `optimism’ and the realisation that at first it meant almost the opposite of what we now mean by it, namely that the world was at its `optimum’ and could not […]

Tropical forests became more diverse during the warm episode of 55m years ago. A new paper in Science casts further doubt on the usefulness of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) as a warning of what we face from man-made carbon emissions. Tropical rain forests became more diverse, not less, during the warm spell. The paleontologist […]