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On the use of straw men in scientific arguments I found this on John Hawks’s anthropology blog. He’s writing about the sometimes heated debate over whether Homo floresiensis is a species or a deformity: What I notice is that when I write about this, I have to correct a lot of false claims about what the […]

Scepticism about economic growth is a reactionary, not a radical philosophy Daniel Ben-Ami’s new book `Ferraris For All‘, published by the Policy Press, is a great read. Ben-Ami’s point is to defend the idea of economic development against the `growth sceptics’ who have emerged in various blue, green and red guises recently. What he does […]

What happens after oil spills I have written an op-ed article in The Times today. It’s behind a paywall, but here’s my last draft before editing by the newspaper, together with links. So long as the cap holds, and assuming that is the end of it, the Deepwater Horizon spill (up to 600,000 tonnes in […]

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. […]